The extreme care that Claude Debussy took in his autograph manuscripts also had its dark side ... An annoying tendency to leave his drafts unfinished, even at the sketching stage. This is recalled by the fascinating album The Unknown Debussy , by pianist Nicolas Horvath, which has just been published by Grand Piano (distribution Naxos).
Based on the research and reconstruction work of musicologist Robert Orledge, music professor at the University of Liverpool, he brings back to life about fifteen unfinished pieces, replaced or voluntarily forgotten by the composer. From the prelude to the opera he had planned around the Breton myth of Tristan, in response to that of Wagner, to the very first version of a Girl with linen hair whose simplicity and conciseness stand out with the final score. Miniatures in the form of preludes to which other sketches respond: like the fascinating drafts of a symphonic fragment of the Martyrdom of San Sebastian , of stage music around King Lear or of his Chinese ballet project No-ja -li , or the palace of silence , whose passage here proposed, based on a prelude of gamelan, is accompanied by the narration of the playwright Florient Azoulay.
Rare examples of the fifty works that the composer intended for the stage, and only two of which will eventually see the light of day ( Pelléas et Mélisande et Jeux ). So many fascinating first recordings, whose feeling of exhumation is reinforced by the virtuoso and evanescent playing of Horvath, as much as by the muffled tones of the piano of the 1920s chosen for this disc.