A new recording of Debussy's 24 Preludes challenges the great and the good, primarily of Gieseking Michelangeli and Krystian Zimmerman. Yet from Anna Tsybuleva you hear playing of a special finesse and evocation that it makes comparison irrelevant. There is a haunting sense of the novel, eerie and unfathomable(the characteristics that so offended the die-hards of the Paris Conservatoire who saw Debussy's innovatory genius as dangerous and unacceptable; they had 'nursed a viper in their bosom.' Here is all of the mystery and archaism behind 'Danseuses de Delphes,' while in 'Voiles'( Cortot-- most fanciful of critics-- saw 'the flight of a white wing over the crooning sea towards the horizon bright with the setting sun') there is an uncanny feel for alternating stillness and unrest. There is always a sense of Debussy's infinite variety, the way, for example, he can change from the near minimalist desolation of 'Des Pas Sur la Neige,' a vision that takes you forward to the poet Wallace Stevens, his ultimate no less snow-bound negation of the 'nothing that is not there and the nothing that is' to the droll
humour of 'Hommage A S Pickwick Esq, from the element's rage in 'Ce Qu'a Vu La Vent d'oust' to the simple beauty of 'Bryere's where, as one writer put it, you can almost smell the heather. Then there is Debussy's fascination with Hispaniciseed4, for the exotic next-door neighbour he never visited, whether in the teasing mockery of 'La Serenade Interrompue' or the majestic vision of 'la Puerto del Vino.'
Clearly, I could continue, once again drawn into the wonder of these miraculous pieces through Tsybuleva's pianism and above all her response to what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called 'inscape,' to what lies below the surface. She has a few surprises up her sleeve. ';Generale Lavine; Excentric' capers drunkenly in an unusually fast tempo, and there is an added touch of caprice in the failed seduction behind 'La Serenade Interrompus.'
Enchanted with what is available I find myself longing for more Debusssy from Tsybuleva, a wish to hear her in the early evanescent magic(where Chopin's ghost is still just discernible) of the Arabesques, 'Reverie,' the 'Tarantelle styrienne' etc, in the transition to the full blown impressionism of the ';Images' and 'Estampes' and finally in the greater abstraction of the Etudes, Debussy's last will and testament, so to speak, for the keyboard. An Aladdin's cave of riches, all central to what has so aptly been called the 'Debussian revolution.
In the Preludes Tsybuleva is more precise than Gieseking(whose Debussy was nonetheless aptly described as being like ';the gardens of Giverny', less the chilly perfectionist than Michelangeli and, remarkably, finding a middle course between Krystian Zimmerman's plea for clarity and structure and Gieseking's opalescent magic She has been excellently recorded with ample space between each Prelude, allowing you time to savour the wonder of each item. Anna Tsyvulena, too, allows you space to relish the wonder, Quite without forcing or artifice, she is at the heart of the Debussian world, one that broke with 'barren traditioon' to evoke 'air boundless as the elements the wind, the sky, the sea.'
Bryce Morrison