Debussy Piano Four-Hands – Armengaud and Chauzu

Two Frenchmen sitting at one keyboard, four hands and one shared spine of attention — there is something almost domestic about the genre, something that harks back to parlors and Sunday afternoons, to Fauré and Messager playing through the latest Debussy before anyone in Paris had heard an orchestra touch it. That intimacy is exactly what this disc trades on, for better and, once or twice, for a little bit worse.

Armengaud and Chauzu know this repertoire from the inside. Armengaud has been a Debussy evangelist for decades — his recordings and his prose both attest to a scholar’s patience with sources — and it shows in the Première Suite d’orchestre, a work most listeners, myself included, will be encountering here for the first time in any form. Written when Debussy was barely out of his teens, unpublished until 2008, it inhabits that curious space before the harmonic revolution, when the young composer was still absorbing Massenet and Delibes and the perfumed sonorities of the Prix de Rome establishment he would soon enough turn his back on. And yet — this is the uncanny thing — it never sounds like anyone but Debussy. The fingerprints are there in embryo: the parallel harmonies edging toward color rather than function, the woodwind-like transparency even in a piano-duet texture, that particular way of letting a phrase dissolve rather than cadence. Twenty-six minutes is a long sit for juvenilia, but it never drags, and the reading finds a songful ease in it that argues for the piece’s worth beyond mere musicological curiosity.

The Petite Suite everybody knows, or thinks they know, mostly through Büsser’s amiable orchestration, all those Pops-concert performances of “En bateau” with the harp glinting away. Hearing it here, stripped back to two pianists and eighty-eight keys, restores a certain domestic charm the orchestral version tends to varnish over. Armengaud takes the primo part; the give-and-take between the two players has the unforced rapport of people who have rehearsed a piece until it stopped needing rehearsal. Tempos are unhurried without turning soft-headed — no small feat in “Cortège,” which can curdle into sentimentality if a lesser team overplays that dotted rhythm.

The Six Épigraphes antiques is where things get genuinely strange, and wonderful. Late Debussy — repurposed, in fact, from the incidental music he wrote in 1900 for Pierre Louÿs’s Chansons de Bilitis, that scandalous little exercise in faux-Greek eroticism — this score inhabits a harmonic world so advanced it barely uses tonality as a load-bearing wall anymore. Parallel fifths, whole-tone smears, modal inflections borrowed from an antiquity that never existed except in Debussy’s imagination and Louÿs’s prose poems: it is sensuous music that refuses to resolve, and Armengaud and Chauzu let it hang in the air rather than forcing false clarity onto it. The engineers deserve credit here too, because the close, present sound — you can hear pedaling, you can practically hear the players breathing — suits this music’s ambiguities rather better than it might suit, say, a Brahms sonata.

Which brings me to a caveat about that engineering, because it is worth naming. The perspective drops the listener directly between the two keyboards, treble arm’s length to the right, bass close on the left — a vantage no concertgoer could ever occupy, since it would require sitting inside the piano. It’s a choice, not a flaw exactly; it makes for astonishingly vivid, present sound, the kind where you catch the faint thump of a sustain pedal being released a half-second late. But it is not how four-hand piano music is heard in a hall, and listeners used to a more blended, distanced balance may need a minute to adjust. There’s also, more plainly, an edit that doesn’t quite vanish — a small hiccup a few minutes into the Marche écossaise, the digital seam audible if you’re listening closely, a reminder that even in an age of surgical Pro Tools work, splices can slip.

That march, incidentally, is a discographical footnote worth having: the original 1891 four-hand version, before Debussy orchestrated it in 1908 at the request (so the story goes) of a Scottish general who wanted his clan tune dressed up properly. It’s slighter than everything else on the program, frankly a bit foursquare, but it’s played with such unforced Gallic wit that one forgives its structural predictability.

Competing versions of this exact program are scarce enough that comparison feels almost beside the point — you’d have to go piecemeal, Katia and Marielle Labèque for the Petite Suite, someone else entirely for the Épigraphes. As an assembled whole, played by musicians who clearly believe in the music’s coherence rather than its rarity value, this disc earns its place. Not flawless. Occasionally too close for comfort. But alive, curious, and argued with real conviction — which is, in the end, what you want from an unfamiliar Debussy.