Search - Claude Debussy, Piano Vladimir Viardo :: Debussy Preludes Livres I & II

Viardo & Debussy: Deep, Strong, Vigorous, Hypnotic, Shimmeri

Dan Fee | Berkeley, CA USA | 07/16/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Vladimir Viardo was well launched into an active international career, when the old Soviet Union pulled him back abruptly, cancelled his travel visa, and virtually kept him all to themselves until Glasnost and Perestroika melted the glacier barriers behind which he still studied, pondered, and matured. By the time Viardo returned to the west, he could go freely just about wherever he wanted, and he did play all over, lots. But the major classical recording companies were fading, and nobody stepped in much to pick up that special calling of high cultural documentation.



Pro Piano is small, but variable. Many of their recordings are live concerts, and those venues may be quite good, so-so average, or poor as soundstages.



On this disc, all goes very, very well.



The venue is the New York (USA) Academy of Arts & Letters. The piano is a Kawai EX. The recording engineers are neither too close, nor too distant, from the all-important piano sounding board so carefully chosen by Kawai in the first place.



One does not necessarily first think of the great Russian pianists when one hears Debussy mentioned. Gertrude Stein's Europe reached consensus that the two best Debussy players were a German, Walter Gieseking, and an American (of all things), Aaron Copland. Sviatoslav Richter played Debussy a lot, but he didn't get good recordings all that often in his later career, even after the old Soviets had disappeared.



There is so much more to Debussy than hitting the notes. On top of this, the musical point is not quite so beholden to any prior major era's stylistic lexicons of phrasing, tempo, harmony, or texture: whether medieval-pre-baroque, baroque, classical, or romantic. To my ears, most performers who attempt his keyboard music fall off the wagon in one of two different directions. Firstly, some players try to score a win by being way too literal. This cleans things up as a start, from the inappropriate clutter that can come from the earlier stylistic periods; but it can also be short of the mark as such. A literalistic Debussian strategy leaves me feeling as if the music were fragile and needed to be protected from variety, richness, mystery, and connotation. Such strictness and restraint does give the music a good chance to speak, sing, and dance - just for itself, as itself. But then one listens and finds oneself wishing ever so much for that additional dimension where a player of great wisdom and self-restraint nevertheless knows how to let this new music itself fly, mainly on its own wings in its own flights of fancy, way beyond the strict and the literal.



Secondly, some players try to reach for the variety, richness, mystery and connotation of Debussy's music - but wrongly using interpretive tools whose bits and pieces are too plainly indebted to something from a previous period in western musical history. It is probably good to do this up to a point, if by experimenting across period styles you can engage the process of opening the music up, to realms beyond strict literalism. But something taken in bits and pieces from any earlier period is not quite right, either. The simplest and most obvious iteration of this excess can be heard when somebody simply tries to do Debussy as if he were only the most French, or the most turn of the century, or the most intuitive of the Great Romantic Composers. Even when well done, this gets Debussy way too close to being a sort of updated, later Chopin (or Liszt, or Schumann) - beautiful, perhaps, and perhaps even quite beautifully played. But actually not really Debussy.



My own pinnacle in Debussy so far is the priceless recorded Debussy set by Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli. To my ears, he alone has climbed so high into the glacier ice of something beyond, and his performances are so utterly thought through in the best sense of that phrase that a listener feels almost physically informed about how that transcendence must have started with strict and literal attention to the notes on the Debussian page. Reaching high, Michelangeli transmits sculpt and structure, still open to fantasy, other-worldliness, color, and all the rest.



Somewhat unexpectedly, Vladimir Viardo does comparably well as Michelangeli in the Debussy Preludes, but perhaps wearing a much more recognizably human face. Viardo's physical vocabulary in the piano preludes might not have exactly the same, extreme ranges that made Michelangeli the strange genius he seemed to be; but something wonderful is still undeniably going on, in Viardo's touch. When I hear him, I can palpably sense that the holy ghost is moving through matter, in a mystical French sort of transubstantiation. Just hear Viardo tolling the deep lower bells in the Submerged Cathedral (La cathedrale engloutie, Bk I, No. 10). The clarity of line is just right, unexaggerated. The colors are right, too, not just as individual notes or whole phrases, but also in relation to one another. Viardo gets the palette of each piece, and never makes one wish his vision had been left even a few moments longer in the developing fluids of whatever dark room helped Viardo along. The sensuality of Viardo in these works is warm to the ear, not cool. The objectivities in Viardo's Debussy - such as they are - consist of the inevitable spaces between embodied beings of real flesh and blood who have ideas, desires, and who can achieve physical and other intimacies. We are not frozen high up, eternally gazing at suprahuman Platonic verities, as we tend to be with Michelangeli.



This disc is a real keeper, then. One hopes that Viardo will keep on, doing Debussy, so lovely and so true as this outing. Yes. Five stars, right at the top, for Debussy playing."

A Wonderful Interpreter of Debussy

M. Jourard | Kirkland, WA United States | 03/15/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I heard Vladimir Viardo perform these Preludes at a concert in Seattle where I purchased the CD. He is a remarkable, sensitive pianist with the most visually expressive hands at the keyboard I've ever seen. These compositions show Debussy's unique "pleasure is the law" approach to writing music. The chord sequences that occur about seventeen seconds into "Danseuses De Delphes" are worth the price of the CD. A great piano recital."

Music lover

H. A. Tenney | Charlottesville,Virginia | 01/03/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"A most underrated performer is Vladimir Viardo,I have seen his live performances on four occasions;once at Carnegie Hall and twice at the Kennedy Center and at the University of Virginia...on each occasion,he electrified the audience with an individual style that expressed what,in my opinion,was almost a vocal expression of the composer's intent,be it Brahms,Prokovief,Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninov.

His music "talks",one can feel it throughout!"