Debussy - 24 Preludes [Arrau]It's taken ages for me to truly get into these Debussy miniatures, they should really hit me hard, they are perfectly weighted in so many ways for me to fall in love with, very short pieces of music with a visual component to them, some of them have strange titles, micro tone poems for piano, and yet... they have just not seeped into my heart, but i think i'm slowly getting there.
The Chilean Claudio Arrau was only in my Blog just the day before yesterday, with a Brahms box set similar to this Debussy set [11th December 2010], he recorded these Preludes in 1979, and like that Brahms set, this has similar pictures [by Christain Steiner too].
The stand out Preludes for me were 3, 7, 9-10, 13, 15-17, 20 & 22, though nothing truly hit me between the eyes, these Preludes certainly impressed me though, of these ten, the two that stood out were No10 from the First Book 'La Cathedrale Engloutie', and No 3 [No 15 overall] from the Second Book 'La Puerta del Vino', and since i don't know No 15 quite as well, i thought i would discuss why i was impressed with it, in essence it's quite a strange prelude [which could be said about a number of them!], a bit of history, 'La Puerta Del Vino' [The Wine Gate] is an arched gate in The Alhambra [a Palace / Fortress in Grenada Spain], and Debussy composed this Prelude having seen a picture of it, he never actually visited and saw the arch for himself.
It starts with a chaotic clangorous mess of an intro [0:00-0:10], but settles into the flamenco rhythms of the guitar in the bass left hand [0:10+], and the flamenco guitar tune in the higher right hand [0:19+], certainly sounding like Moorish strumming / picking, lovely little rippling waves in the treble [0:57-1:11], and then some very Albeniz-esque rhythms [1:12+], with the bass rhythms in the background slightly getting louder, and then exploding in sound [1:36+], and the treble too [1:41+], with some very nice hazy bass strumming ideas right after [1:55-1:59], and towards the end, the tune briefly has a passage high in the treble [3:14-3:20], so in conclusion it's a Moorish flamenco rhythm guitar study, sounding like it's been transcribed from guitar to piano, but rather it's a piano creation from Debussy to depict a guitar, i guess it's that constant bass rhythm in the left hand, and the 'out of tune' effects that make it so Moorish that i really love about it, the best passage is [1:12-1:35], two other interesting things i notice about Arrau's performance, one is that at many points i can hear a certain quiet ringing from the piano, sounding a lot like finger cymbals called zills, like metal castanets used for belly dancing, or am i reading too much into the music here! ha ha, the other thing is that right at the very last note [3:32-3:34], Arrau finishes, but you can still hear the echo, until he uses the damper pedal to silence the strings, rather like a guitarist would put his hand on the strings to silence them, after all both guitar and piano are stringed instruments, another little similarity, each Prelude reveals it's secrets as you truly listen.
Here's Claudio Arrau playing 'La Puerta Del Vino' on YouTube.
