Claude Debussy: Piano Music – Steven Osborne

   in Piano International (Nov, 2017)
This richly inclusive recital is given with such a rare balance of sense and sensitivity that it prompts you to re-think Debussy’s incomparable genius – the revolutionary nature of his soundscape. Following his earlier Hyperion recording of the 24 Préludes, Steven Osborne opens with the triptych formed by Masques, D’un cahier d’esquisses en L’isle joyeuse. In Masques he is brilliantly responsive to its whirling progress and to a quasi-oriental close, strange even by Debussy’s standards. Osborne’s way with L’isle joyeuse is scintillating and vivacious. If the final apotheosis hardly suggests Claudio Arrau’s mischievous advice (‘it must be like an orgasm’), it is suitably grand and exultant.

In ‘Mouvement’ (Images, …