Eliane Rodrigues: Reflets
Navona Records

I come to Eliane Rodrigues' Reflets with great excitement, having been suitably mesmerized by her 2017 Chopin collection Notturno (also on Navona). The Rio de Janeiro-born pianist shares with two of my other favourites, Lara Downes and Bruce Levingston, an uncanny gift for bringing a composer's music to life in seemingly definitive manner; all three demonstrate the utmost sensitivity to material in their handling of tempo, dynamics, and phrasing, and their expressive playing maximizes the musicality of every piece performed.

With Rodrigues playing a Fazioli Concert Grand, six Debussy works were recorded over two days last September in Ghent by the Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp professor, including the multi-movement works Suite Bergamasque, Images, and Pour le Piano (Children's Corner is also included but as a digital bonus only). Of course this one-time child prodigy is a virtuoso, but on Reflets technique is always used to serve the musical content of the French composer's pieces. Neither clinically detached nor emotionally overwrought, her nuanced interpretations occupy a perfect middle ground.

Indicative of her approach to Debussy is her handling of the well-known “Clair de lune” from the four-part Suite Bergamasque. It's worth noting that he first titled the piece “Promenade sentimentale” but then later changed it, the move perhaps signifying his desire to encourage abstract associations over ones clouded by Hallmark-styled sentiment. In line with that, Rodrigues's performance is expressive but not bathetic or cloying, the result a well-tempered version characterized by lucidity. During certain sections, the familiar melodies flow gracefully, whereas at others the tempo slows exquisitely to intensify the dream-like effect. Here and elsewhere, we're reminded of how much she shares with Debussy an appreciation for music's mysterious quality, the way instrumental material in particular encourages a multiplicity of meanings.

Composed in 1890 but published fifteen years later, Suite Bergamasque makes for an excellent opener, its “Prélude” a gloriously expressive way to inaugurate this vibrant set. In this first piece, we're already presented with ample evidence of Rodrigues' sensitivity to the music's subtle shadings, and in her hands, each phrase is voiced with eloquence and a deep grasp of the material, whether it be the lively “Menuet” or the intense “Passepied.”

Her well-calibrated treatment of Ballade brings forth the textural richness of material that exudes some small scent of Russian flavour. Still, as atmospheric as it is, Debussy is at his most visually suggestive in the two three-part sets of Images (1905-07), each ‘book' redolent of the impressionistic quality for which the composer's known. Such an impression is hard to ignore when the composer uses a title such as “Reflets dans l'eau (Reflections in the Water)” and maximizes the music's potential for evocation in material as resplendent as “Cloches à travers les feuilles – (mélancolie diffuse) (Bells Through the Leaves - diffuse melancholy)” and hushed as “Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fût (And the Moon Sets over the Temple That Was).”

July 2018