Search - Claude Debussy, Sergey Schepkin :: Sergey Schepkin Plays Debussy

He sings their secrets

John H. Pendley | the beautiful mountains of north Georgia | 01/14/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Already recognized as one of the foremost interpreters of Bach (please see the glowing reviews of his Goldberg Variations and WTC1), Sergey Schepkin proves himself here to be a master of a far different kind of music, that of Debussy, as well. This son of St. Petersburg, where he studied with that inspired genius of the keyboard Grigory Sokolov, now resides and teaches in Boston; he also pursues an active career as a concert artist. It's an awful shame that this album of music by Debussy has not so much as a picture of its cover on this Amazon page, nor any sound clips to advertise its excellence. I hope to redress some of this oversight because this is the most beautiful playing of Debussy's music that I've heard in many years.



Of the manifold wonders in Preludes, Book I, I will mention several in which I think Schepkin especially shines. In his notes to this CD, he points out that "voiles", in the plural, can mean either "veils" or "sails." However we chose to interpret the meaning of this music, Schepkin's "Voiles" are gossamer, radiant, and shot with light. One can hardly imagine so transparent an image in sound as he creates here. And here, as in so many instances in this album, Schepkin's manages a beautiful wash of sound that never obscures his articulation. "Les collines d'Anacapri" could hardly be more different, and Schepkin captures its ebullience, its effervescence with a irresistible sparkle. If, as he says, this music is meant to evoke the wine of the Italian region named in the title, it must be sun-laced, heady stuff indeed. The much loved "La fille aux cheveaux de lin" is presented with no hint of sentimentality but with direct simplicity, befitting its origins in Scottish folk song. The more I hear Schepkin's playing of this piece, the more I feel cleansed of the many previous versions that I've heard; it is very moving. And I suspect you want to know how fares "La Cathédral engloutie." We begin in deep, deep, mystery, time and motion almost suspended, the music still and quiet. And it is this deep mystery of the opening that is the key to Schepkin's terrific success in this piece, for it opens the way for a masterful piece of juxtaposition. For what follows is the majestic lifting of the Cathedral, a huge edifice of sound-by comparison to that deep subaqueous opening. Schepkin writes that Debussy was much influenced by Mussorgsky in the writing of this piece, and one can certainly hear that influence in the music of the risen Cathedral: it isn't unlike the music of the Great Gate. Finally, all subsides as it had risen, back to the deeps. This is a masterful realization of one of Debussy's best-loved works; when an artist can breathe such life into music that has already been assayed by some of the Debbusyians we have known, he is certainly of the highest stature.



I'll comment on one piece from Image, Series I, comparing Schepkin's performance of "Reflets dans l'eau" to Ivan Moravec' on his 1983 Vox Cum Laude disc, now deleted. (Moravec' Images are now available on a double Vox re-release.) I've come to dislike comparisons, since I don't believe that music making is a contest, but this one may be revealing, and it won't be to either artist's detriment. Moravec displays his uncanny control of legato in this music, as well as a magically liquid touch. It's hard to believe that the piano is a percussion instrument when he plays, and his musical taste is a wonder to behold. In his hands, this piece is about quiet, limpid, shaded water. No sun intrudes; at the climax, one has the impression of a flurry of wind or perhaps a fish has broken the surface. All is serene, placid, and-yes-reflective. This is almost superhumanly beautiful musicianship, unique to this one artist. Schepkin's approach is full of light and shade, and it is more "pianistic." His water has a more varied aspect and a more vital nature. It sparkles and glitters, flashes over rocks, and settles quietly. I don't mean to say that this is an overtly virtuoso performance; Schepkin achieves his effects rather subtle. But it is a performance of great variety and color. Tempos and tone colors ebb and flow with the pulse of nature itself. Even though I've loved Moravec' playing for forty years, and I delighted in his recording of Debussy for a very long time, I'm even happier that I have his and Schepkin's now.



"L'isle joyeuse" is not much recorded in such anthologies, and it is one of my oldest guilty pleasures, so I was delighted to see it listed in the contents of this album. I'm even more delighted to report that Sergey Schepkin gives it the performance of high romance and bravura that it deserves. This is music about the sea, and it is music about passionate love. (This piece is to Debussy what "Tintagel" is to Bax.) In Schepkin's great canvas, it's all there to see. The big melodies roll out, and the big climaxes build and crash against the shore. It's a grand show.



If I am most grateful to this recording, though, and to Sergey Schepkin's playing, for one piece, it is "D'un cahier d'esquisses" (from a sketch book). Here is music, as Schepkin writes, that suspends time and space. We are in a world of huge whole-tone chords that waft and float magically, perhaps like clouds, perhaps like perfume. However one's imagination is affected by this miraculous music, it is completely engrossing, liberating, and soul-stirring. There are small climaxes, but even these are held in a gentle and restraining grasp. The poetry of Schepkin's expression and the beauty of his legato and pianissimo playing are of the order to clutch at the heart and wet the eyes.



When you listen to this wonderful collection, you will surely be taken with marvels of Sergey Schepkin's technical wizardry, and you're sure to be bewitched over and over again with the grace and poetry of his expression. All these are felicities one relishes on the way to what music is really all about. I think you'll quickly realize that Schepkin understands what it's all about once you've heard this album: the greatest of his gifts is that he knows the personality, the voice of each of these pieces, and he makes them sing to us of all their secrets.



Most highly recommended



John Pendley"

Sergey Schepkin plays Debussy: Whew. Don't talk. Listen.

Dan Fee | Berkeley, CA USA | 05/16/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Let me start my comments with full disclosure. I am still getting into Debussy's piano music, phrase by phrase by phrase. Work by work by work. I grasped La Mer and the Nocturnes whole, as it were. But getting to be real friends with the piano works is needing many more instances of listening, and much more time to comprehend, internally. So far, I hear many highly regarded players who just don't make all that much aural sense to me in this repertoire although many others think them just fine.



Every now and then I hear a performance which seems right to me, and those recordings end up on my fav keepers shelves. So far, the players which have made lasting sense in Debussy's piano works include: Ivan Moravec, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, and Paul Jacobs. I can appreciate this piece or that played by others, but to my ears and mind, these few make the most musical sense of the complex and intuitive aspects of this amazing music.



So we come to consider Russian-born pianist, Sergey Schepkin. He first studied in St. Petersburg, then Boston. His teachers or mentors have included the likes of Grigory Sokolov, Russell Sherman, and Paul Doguereau. Schepkin's reputation for genius has so far rested on the sure foundations of his stunning Bach performances, all played on the modern grand piano. If you do not already know these Bach recordings, well maybe you should make room to hear them as soon as possible. There is possibly no other living player who so nearly equals the joy, intelligence, and sense of discovery which we knew for forty years or so, long associated with Glenn Gould playing Bach on the piano, except Schepkin. Not only is his Bach playing a gift of fire, Schepkin seems at times to be having even more fun with it than Gould did, if that is at all possible. Don't let the comparisons with Glenn Gould fool you - that is just listeners reaching for historical performance touchstones anywhere near Schepkin - and rest assured that Sergey Schepkin is his own person, musically speaking.



So we come to a genius of a Bach player turning his attentions to Claude Debussy, several hundred years later.



How to describe what is very hard to explain in words, but easier to hear right off?



First. The astounding clarity of line, polyphony, harmony, and rhythm that Schepkin consistently devotes to serving Bach also is brought to bear in service of Debussy. The fun sense of winging inspiration is also nothing short of illuminating. Where other players are content to smear, blur, or clatter, Schepkin yields up very precise tonal colors, phrasings, and shapes. These qualities live deeply inside each and every passing measure, and never get pasted on Debussy from the outside, and never violate the true character of the music, so French and yet so universal.



Schepkin's tonal palette is extremely wide and varied. His Debussy has bold, primary colors, as well as pastels, and all manner of integrated effects of sunshine and shadow and far to near to middling perspective inside a horizon that frames and make vision possible without calling undue attention to its artifice. This would be amazing enough all by itself, but like Moravec and Michelangeli, Schepkin somehow manages to convey a vivid and fitting sense of all the precisely etched musical colors of the keyboard being so constantly in motion. (Part of that magic probably belongs to the engineer, plus the venue of Jordan Hall at the New England Conservatory, plus the Steinway D.)



Debussy's musical forms are nothing, if not intuitive. And so, while Schepkin always approaches the music with curiosity and intelligence, there is a palpable sense of dark, of mystery, of surfaces borne up by well nigh inexplicable cosmic and tangential quantum depths below all the myriad surfaces of things in nature.



Now any listener probably will have to admit that Shepkin falls just a tad short of the unfailing and magisterial distance, the sheer control, the wizardry that Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli brought to his recordings of Debussy. But that matters less in the end than the comparison suggests. Ivan Moravec fell short of sheer Apollonian distance and control in his Debussy, and yet that is still marvelous.



Count Schcpkin's Debussy another marvel, then.



His readings of the first book of preludes, and the first set of images is going to be much, much, much more than soothing pastel background music listening. One only prays and hopes that the rest of Debussy's piano music is somewhere in the near future, probably along with at least the core Ravel piano works if not all the Ravel piano music.



Then - and only then I suppose? - will I hope and pray that Schepkin records the shamefully neglected Schumann Novelletten cycle.



If wishes were horses ... Get this disc if you have a spot for Debussy with any sense of essential welcome. Highly, highly recommended."