Debussy/Tilson Thomas - Images; Jeux, etc

The Guardian 100

San Francisco SO/Tilson Thomas
(San Francisco Symphony)

Michael Tilson Thomas’s pedigree as a conductor of Debussy is a long and distinguished one. The main work here, the complete orchestral Images, also featured on his first ever Debussy recording, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra for Deutsche Grammophon in 1971, and he later recorded Jeux as well, with the London Symphony for CBS (now Sony Classical). These new versions, though, with the bonus of Debussy’s own orchestral arrangement of his piano piece La Plus Que Lente, not only benefit from superlative state-of-the-art sound but from the astonishing rapport that Tilson Thomas has developed with the San Francisco orchestra during his 20 years as its music director.

Together they produce Debussy playing of intense colour, using a palette that never seems remotely wishy-washy or lazily “impressionistic”, but is founded on rhythmic precision and exact textural balance. It’s as effective in the descriptive and evocative pieces of the Images as it is in the much more elusive scenario of Jeux, in which Tilson Thomas weaves the thematic threads into a shimmering, allusive web, with the insidious waltz that emerges in the final pages connecting neatly with the slow waltz of La plus Que Lente. A gorgeous disc.