(May 25, 2019)
Reflets dans l’eau…
This is another very famous piece of music by Debussy. Perhaps the most famous recordings of this piece were done by Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli. Here are two different videos by him.
The first is live and probably of lower sound quality, but very interesting because you can see the man playing.
Same piece, same man…
but this time the studio recordings. I don’t care much for the way the music is shown, but it does not disturb listen to it.
In the first video the pianist played from memory!!
It’s mostly traditional to play traditional music without music. I don’t agree with this tradition.
Debussy grows on me more and more. It’s like music taken out of all boxes, and supplied with a generous paint pot of colours we can allow to run together in shadings, or stay crisp and separate.
I think over time you realize that a lot of his music sounds much like computer game music, but much better.The sounds he used are 100% relative to today.
Believe it or not I had never heard this before. This is mad, beautiful music!
It’s probably no coincidence that Debussy and Ravel linked so much titles of music to water. Do you know Debussy’s “La Mer”?
The first video sounds like fuller than the second, maybe it’s just the audio quality.
Audio quality is a problem when comparing. When you listen to really old recordings, you have to sort of filter what you hear through your imagination because way back the quality was so inferior. Have you ever listened to mono recordings? Do you know that mono means?
As I listen to this music I can picture the calm and peaceful water. Towards the middle it becomes more turbulent, distorting the clear reflections. As the piece concludes, the water returns to its peaceful state and the reflections are almost like looking in a mirror.
Music from this time is called “Impressionism”, a term composers did not like at all. But it stuck. Some of it uses a lot of pedal to blend sounds together, but the music can also use very little pedal and is very clear and precise.