Music in Time of War: Debussy and Komitas album review – fascinating collection of composer’s final works

Claude Debussy completed his final orchestral work, the ballet Jeux, in 1913. Through the years of the first world war, up to his death in 1918, he composed piano works, songs and the first three of a planned set of six sonatas. Kirill Gerstein’s fascinatingly compiled collection, which comes handsomely packaged with essays and contemporary photographs, concentrates on the piano music and songs, which are interspersed with music by the Armenian ethnomusicologist and composer Komitas Vardapet, whose work Debussy much admired. The Komitas piano pieces and vocal works here are essentially folk song transcriptions, though Gerstein and the soprano Ruzan Mantashyan perform them with great skill and care, and it’s inevitably the music by Debussy that is the real focus of the set.

Gerstein is superb if just a little clinical in Debussy’s 12 Études, and he’s partnered by Thomas Adès in a fine performance of the two-piano En Blanc et Noir, and by Katia Skanavi in the six Epigraphes Antiques. A sequence of final works includes Debussy’s last piano piece, the tiny Les Soirs Illuminés par l’Ardeur de Charbon (Evenings Lit by Glowing Coals), which was only rediscovered in 2001, and his last song, the touching Noel des Enfants Qui n’ont Plus de Maisons (Christmas Carol for Homeless Children).

Stream it on Apple Music (above) or Spotify.