Debussy and Ravel Piano Works – Benjamin Moser

There’s a moment near the end of “Jimbo’s Lullaby” — the second piece in Debussy’s Children’s Corner — where the bass line has to sound like it’s half-asleep, nodding, catching itself. Benjamin Moser gets this exactly right. The voicing is soft-grained, the pedaling judicious, and you believe utterly that a small girl is being lulled toward dreams by a stuffed elephant. It’s a lovely piece of pianism, and it made me sit forward in my chair. Which is more than I can say for a good deal of the rest of this recital.

Moser is the pianist brother of the cellist Johannes Moser, and the family gift for tone production is evident: this is a player who can make a Steinway growl or shimmer as the moment requires. But French repertoire of this vintage, Debussy and Ravel at the turn of the last century, wants something more elusive than tonal command. It wants ambiguity. Harmonies that don’t resolve so much as evaporate. A pianist willing to let the music hover rather than land.

Children’s Corner comes off best of anything here, and “Golliwog’s Cakewalk” in particular is a delight: brash, a little vulgar in the best sense, Debussy’s affectionate needling of American ragtime rendered with real comic timing. The “Serenade for the Doll” has poise and a certain dry wit. Moser’s more assertive, harder-edged manner (there’s something almost Germanic in the way he’ll lean into a chord that Gieseking or Casadesus would have let dissolve) actually pays dividends in this suite, and again in several of the Estampes, where “Pagodes” has an attractively lacquered, gong-like resonance and “La soirée dans Grenade” enough sultry indolence to get by.

But “La plus que lente” needs Gallic perfume, not muscle. This is salon music, a slightly ironic waltz that Debussy wrote with one eyebrow raised, and it wants rubato that breathes rather than pushes. Moser pushes. The chords land too hard, the tempo insists where it should merely suggest, and the whole miniature comes off foursquare when it should sound like smoke curling off a cigarette in some Parisian tea room circa 1910.

Ravel’s Jeux d’eau is the recital’s oddest achievement: cool, exact, almost machined, each figuration ticking into place with a watchmaker’s precision. I don’t think this is remotely what Ravel intended. He wanted water, glinting and unpredictable, not a metronome with a fountain attached. And yet I found myself admiring it anyway. There’s an integrity to that kind of severity. Whether you’ll enjoy it depends on how much you need your water to actually splash.

The real disappointment is Gaspard de la Nuit, and here I’ll be blunt: this is one of the most fearsome pieces in the entire keyboard literature, a triptych Ravel wrote explicitly to be harder than Balakirev’s Islamey, and it demands a pianist who can see the whole arch of each movement before playing the first note. Moser doesn’t, quite. “Ondine” arrives underarticulated at the top, the rippling figuration a touch smudged where it should shimmer with malicious clarity. This water-sprite is supposed to seduce, and instead she just sort of appears. “Le Gibet” fares better, its tolling B-flat achieving something genuinely desolate. But “Scarbo” is where the rendition comes apart structurally, if not technically. Moser has all the notes, and there are a lot of them, this is one of the most punishing movements Ravel ever wrote, but the piece emerges in blocks rather than as a continuous, escalating nightmare. You hear the seams. Compare Argerich, or Pogorelich in his prime, or even Michelangeli’s icy control, and you hear pianists who understand that “Scarbo” is one long crescendo of dread, not a sequence of virtuosic episodes stitched together. Moser plays the episodes. The dread doesn’t accumulate.

Sound is superb: present, warm, with enough air around the instrument that inner voices register without harshness. If you’re buying through eClassical or a similar high-resolution download service, this is a disc better sampled track by track than swallowed whole. The Children’s Corner, the best of the Estampes, perhaps Jeux d’eau if his cooler aesthetic appeals: these are worth your time and your euros. The rest you can live without, and Gaspard you should hear elsewhere entirely.