Piano Forum

How intersting; lots of very contrasting names thrown out there.

Most of the Debussy recordings available are made from rolls, and my impression is that they were not done very artistically.  There are electric recordings of Debussy accompanying on the piano, but I have not heard those.  They should be very interesting.

Kapell and Horowitz's reading is clear and striking; Benedetti Michelangeli, Arrau, and Richter's much more atmospheric.  These five play romantic Debussy.  More recent exponents of this approach include Bunin and (somewhat surprisingly) Pollini.

Then you have Gieseking, Robert Schmitz, and later Krystian Zimerman, Martin Jones, and Ziggy Weissenberg, all of whom project an anti-romantic, highly objective Debussy.  I would put Pierre-Laurent Aimard here.  There is no question he is a rock of a player, although for my taste, I don't feel anything when I hear him in this repertoire (unlike in his Ligeti and Messiaen).

I personally love Claude Frank's Debussy, which I find very beautiful; romantic in feeling but not sentimental in expression.  Bolet (my favorite, although he recorded so little of it0 has a little disk of preludes, played very much in this spirit.  I would say this somewhat neo-classical approach (which is romantic in content and emotional intensity, but classical in proportinality, elegance, and grace) can be traced back to Cortot.  I would say Entremont and Paul Jacobs would go in this bucket as well.

Then you have Rubinstein (and now Barenboim), somewhere between the romantic and the neoclassical.

I think choosing one or the other as the ultimate is a little parochial; after all, it is a matter of taste - and in Debussy (in words of Massenet: an "enigma") one may resonate strongly with one aspect of his music and not at all with another.