Claire De Lune: Debussy Favorites[2 CD]

The haunting representation of watery moonlight known as Clair de lune regularly crops up in "classical greatest hits" lists, has been used to advertise everything from chocolate to shampoo, and has even appeared in the The Twilight Saga (CD 1 [1]; the orchestrated version is on CD 2 [1]). It's an undeniable masterpiece of musical painting, but Claude-Achille Debussy was far more than a one-hit wonder. His ballet Pr©lude   l'apr¨s-midi d'un faune (CD 1 [3]) pulses with sensuous eroticism. His tone poem La Mer (CD 2 [12-14]) evokes the changing moods of the sea with awe-inspiring accuracy. And all learner pianists thrive on the simple-but-challenging works in Children's Corner (CD 2 [3-5]), written for his young daughter.

It is not always the fate of innovators to be popularly acclaimed during their lifetimes, but Debussy had both critical and public success. His innovations included the incorporation of non-western sounds into his music, after a particularly inspirational visit to a Javanese gamelan exhibition in 1889. He also explored mood-painting, atonalism, and even jazz, and his ideas were taken up and developed by composers as diverse as Stravinsky, Britten, Duke Ellington and John Williams. But listen to the relatively late piano piece La Terrasse des audiences du clair de lune of 1913 (CD 2 [2]) to hear how he always tempered his experiments with a common, instantly accessible touch.