Debussy: Piano Duets, Vol. 2

Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, L 86b; Clair de lune, L 75 / 3; Nocturnes, L 91; Lindaraja, L 97; La Soirée dans Grenade, L 100 / 2; Deux Danses, L 103b; Rêverie, L 68; En blanc et noir, L 134; La plus que lente, L 121a

Lous Lortie, Hélène Mercier

Chandos CHAN 20395
chandos.net

There is no mistaking the sound world of Debussy, and this new Chandos release announces itself at once with two of his most instantly recognisable pieces: the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune and Clair de lune. The latter, transcribed for two pianos, works surprisingly well in this format — though one might reasonably ask why a duet arrangement is needed at all when the original is so perfectly conceived for a single performer. Whatever reservations one might harbour on that score, the playing itself silences them: the expression is delicate and sensitively shaded throughout, with dynamics scrupulously observed and pianissimos deployed to real effect.

The disc closes with a winning account of La plus que lente, beautifully turned and rounding off what is, in sum, a most agreeable album. There is creativity and no shortage of skill in these interpretations. Rêverie, in particular, charms from the first bar. Much of that charm comes down to sound as well as substance: the recording was made on a Bösendorfer 280VC concert grand in the Concert Hall at Snape Maltings, Suffolk, and Chandos's engineers have captured its warmth with their customary skill.

Hélène Mercier and Louis Lortie, both raised in Montreal, have been performing together as a duo since the 1980s, and that history tells it all. Their partnership—pursued alongside flourishing solo careers—has the easy intimacy of musicians who have spent decades in each other's company, on the concert platform, and in the studio. This is their ninth album for Chandos, and it continues the Debussy survey begun on their first volume of duets.

The programme is shrewdly assembled, pairing transcriptions – by Ravel, Dutilleux, Woollett, Durand and Roques – of some of Debussy's best-loved orchestral and solo works (the Prélude, the Nocturnes, Clair de lune, La Soirée dans Grenade, La plus que lente, and Rêverie) with two pieces Debussy conceived for two pianos from the outset, Lindaraja and En blanc et noir. Mercier and Lortie trade the first and second player's roles between them, a democratic arrangement that suits the unforced equality of their playing.

This second volume confirms everything that made the first such a pleasure. Where that earlier disc closed with the duo navigating the swells of La Mer, their four hands conjuring waves rising and falling with virtuosic abandon, here they return to gentler waters – the "dreaming water" of the Petite Suite's opening skiff is replaced by the hazy, sun-warmed stillness of the faun's afternoon. Mercier and Lortie's chemistry, so astutely synchronised in that earlier seafaring journey, remains entirely undimmed—still punctilious in their attention to dynamics, still alive to the colour and atmosphere in even the most familiar of these scores.