Claude Debussy: Les Trois Sonates – The Late Works

A century after his death on 25 March 1918, many harmonia mundi artists are eager to pay tribute to Claude Debussy, the magician of melody and timbre, the great ‘colourist’ and father of modern music.

In the three chamber sonatas, here combined with the composer’s final pieces for solo piano, we attain the purity, the absolute concision, the distant and mysterious world that give these works a testamentary dimension.

Until recently this music was almost invariably viewed and experienced through a prism of 19th-century rhetoric – listening to Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov deftly tracing the evanescent contours of the Violin Sonata comes therefore as something of a revelation…Most striking of all is the enchanting triple sonata, whose harp-inflected musings appear to float free of musical gravity in this hypnotic account…One of the most captivating releases of the Debussy centenary year. — BBC Music Magazine, Christmas 2018