Ever the showman, Jean-Yves Thibaudet revels in Debussy's 24 Préludes

This past Sunday in a recital at Chicago’s Symphony Center, the eminent French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet traversed the 24 Préludes of Claude Debussy like the wind over the plains or footsteps in the snow. With thoughtfully constructed textures and cogent interpretations, Thibaudet showed that he’s lived in these pieces for a while – his Decca recording of the set is now nearly 30 years old.

Thibaudet excels at distinguishing lines within distinct timbres and articulations, in a sense orchestrating these colorful works even for a solo instrument. Right from the first prelude, Danseuses de Delphes, he constructed a clear sound world. Debussy writes separate sets of slurs: slurs for a chromatic melody that mostly live in the middle of the keyboard and slurs for staccato chords on the outer reaches. Even while jumping back and forth across the keyboard, Thibaudet communicated these lines as distinct beings. He accomplished this partly through impressive pedaling, made more salient for the live audience by his sequined shoes.

The audience got the impression that Thibaudet was having some theatrical fun playing up the character of these unique pieces. He galloped and bounced in Les collines d’Anacapri, he skittered through La danse de Puck, and he slid through Brouillards. When any opportunity approached for a cute ending to tickle the audience, such as in the otherwise academic Les tierces alternées, he took it. The angry sea in Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest was actually a little playful in its tempest.

As a pianist who works in a slew of genres, Thibaudet was able to shape-shift for some interpretations. The Spanish flair of La sérénade interrompue and the exoticism of La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune slid on like different jackets (not to marginalize his black-on-black patterned blazer, managing to be both flashy and understated at the same time). The jazz he found in Les feuilles mortes brought to mind the standard with that same title.

The angular, the mercurial, and the undulant are Thibaudet’s specialties. All came together in the ludicrously virtuosic Feux d’artifice, a tour de force of technique. He passed the busy opening motif, racing like a flaming wick, back and forth between his hands to allow for staccato jumps in the extremes of the keyboard. He controlled glissandi, went crashingly forte, and still managed to pull the tunes out.

It is commonplace these days, of course, for two-hour recitals to be played from memory, but even so, the immense amount of harmonically unpredictable and precisely notated music Thibaudet memorized for this performance – 123 pages in my Debussy compendium at home – deserves a shout-out.

The only disappointment in the performance was the obverse of Thibaudet’s excellence with complex textures and virtuosity: The simpler textures and slower pieces felt tossed off, less consequential. La fille aux cheveux de lin, probably the best known of all the Préludes, never took its rubatos all the way to slow, and the overall tempo was too fast to luxuriate in. Des pas sur la neige, also, saw its walk in the snow more of a hurry than a trudge, too fast to seem weary – faster, indeed, than Thibaudet played it for the 1996 recording.

For an encore, Thibaudet announced to the audience that there were no more Debussy Préludes, unfortunately, so he would have to play something else. He settled on Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte, delivered sensitively but not slowly. The end of the princess was the end of the concert. I’m not sure Thibaudet meant it that cheekily, but it fits.