I agree with Jon Lewis, in my experience there have been no Debussy
recordings more vividly evocative than Gieseking's.  His are unusually
brisk and propulsive readings, the musical line never falls apart as it
can sometimes do in this music.

I have the '50s 4-disc set and the Philips Great Pianists issue.  Like Jon,
I was a bit disappointed by the latter - even faster than the later version
and rather too self-assured and streamlined, although it has to be said G.
performs feats of tonal and rhythmic control here that are pretty
jaw-dropping - even more so in Ravel's Gaspard.  The fact it often sounds
a bit cool and superficial may be due to the recording which is rather
distant and irons out the top dynamic levels.

Has Jon heard Michelangeli? On the face of it I would prefer Gieseking -
M. is more stylized and abstract, he doesn't have G.'s directly evocative
sense of sonority - his piano sound, while much more subtly shaded than
it first appears, is a bit too uniformly lucid and 'Mediterranean' for my
taste.  However, as time wears on I suspect Michelangeli will yield equal
or even greater dividends - while his readings are on the whole slower and
more static than Gieseking's, he has a grip on the 'Innenspannung', the
inherent harmonic tension that is very intense and really pays off in the
sparer and more elusive pieces.  In 'Des pas sur la neige' for instance, he
can communicate the frozen tension, the great sadness underlying the work
in a way that is very moving indeed.

Felix Delbruck
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