Lubimov. The name may not land with the instant recognition of a Pollini or an Uchida, but among musicians who know — and that circle is wider than the record industry has ever let on — Alexei Lubimov occupies a singular place. He gave the Moscow premieres of works by Terry Riley and John Cage in 1968, when such programming required something closer to courage than curiosity. He has spent decades navigating the repertoire from Baroque to the Soviet avant-garde with equal seriousness. And now, late in a long career, he has made what may be the most searching recorded account of Debussy’s Préludes I have encountered in some years.
The story behind it matters.
Lubimov came across a 1913 Steinway at the Polish Embassy in Brussels — reputedly the instrument Paderewski actually played in his recitals there — and something in its voice apparently undid forty years of accumulated certainty about how this music should go. That kind of disruption is rarer than it sounds. Most pianists, by the time they have played a piece ten thousand times, have calcified their interpretation into received habit. Lubimov went back to the beginning.
The instrument he uses for Book 1 of the Préludes is a 1925 Bechstein, and its character shapes everything: clear, translucent, sharply focused even when the textures thicken, which in Debussy they thicken fast. Lubimov describes the Brussels Steinway he reserves for Book 2 as “divinely soft in pianissimo, resonant and marvellously suitable for unexpected colours.” Both descriptions are accurate, and more than accurate — they are the interpretive program, stated plainly. This is a pianist who knows what he wants, and knows why he wants it.
Debussy himself, by all the accounts we have, played without sentimentality and without the fog of excessive pedal — more transparently than his reputation for impressionism might suggest. Lubimov is in that tradition. Where some pianists drench “La cathédrale engloutie” in reverberant sustain until the cathedral in question seems less submerged than simply dissolved, Lubimov keeps the architecture audible. You hear the counterpoint. You hear the fifths moving. The bell-tones ring and then — they stop. The silence has weight.
This is not, I should say, the only way to play this music. Roger Woodward’s recording has stayed with me for years, and Woodward operates from a fundamentally different aesthetic — he holds you in a kind of saturated harmonic suspension, the pedal doing atmospheric work that Lubimov would rather leave to the fingers. It is a legitimate choice, even a luminous one. Paul Jacobs’s old Nonesuch set, if you can still locate a copy, is something close to miraculous in its own right, that dry American intelligence illuminating the Préludes from inside the notes rather than around them. What Lubimov offers that neither of those does — quite — is the physical texture of an earlier piano culture, the sense that these instruments and this music were, once, the same world.
The two-piano arrangements fill out the set: Ravel’s transcription of the Nocturnes and Debussy’s own reduction of the Prélude à l’après-midi d’une faune, both shared with the younger Alexei Zuev. The Faune transcription is the more revelatory — Debussy’s own reworking of his own orchestral score, and therefore a document, not a convenience. The flute’s opening arabesque becomes, on the piano, something less spectral and more erotic; the harmonic vagueness that the orchestra can sustain in midair has to be pinned down, committed to, and the two pianists do commit, with a sensuality that is entirely disciplined.
Ravel’s Nocturnes transcription is a stranger beast — Ravel, after all, had his own very particular relationship with Debussy, compounded of admiration and rivalry and a certain amount of mutual suspicion — and it shows. The “Nuages” movement translates with eerie success; “Fêtes” is dazzling but slightly mechanical, as if the orchestral propulsion has been replaced by a very precise clockwork. “Sirènes” loses its wordless women’s chorus, of course, and nothing quite fills that absence. These are quibbles. The playing throughout is distinguished.
What finally recommends this recording above all is not the period instruments, interesting as they are — the timbral argument, however compelling, can become its own kind of fetish — but the quality of musical thought behind every phrase. Lubimov listens to Debussy the way a great editor listens to a manuscript: he knows what the writer intended even when the writer was not entirely sure himself. The result is a set of Préludes that illuminates rather than decorates, that trusts the music to be strange enough without any additional help.
It is, in the best sense, a mature disc. And maturity in a performer is not a consolation prize.
