Claire De Lune: Debussy Favorites[2 CD]

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.