The year 2018 marked a century since Debussy’s death, and among the recordings it produced, this Harmonia Mundi album stands apart — not as a commemorative gesture but as a document of genuinely probing musicianship. Six soloists of the first rank, each associated with thoughtful, historically aware chamber playing, take the three late sonatas at their own pace and on their own terms, with solo piano miniatures by Javier Perianes interspersed as palate cleansers and context-setters. It’s a concept that could have felt gimmicky; in practice it feels completely right.
Debussy wrote the three sonatas — for cello and piano (1915), flute, viola, and harp (1916), and violin and piano (1917) — in the last years of his life, weakened by cancer and chilled by the First World War. The music carries that knowledge without quite displaying it: there is irony, lightness, and even wit here alongside the quiet desolation. Many performances opt for lyrical beauty and smooth it into a single emotional tone. This recording doesn’t. Each sonata gets a distinct character, and the musicians understand that the contrasts within each work are the point.
Jean-Guihen Queyras and Perianes in the Cello Sonata are the most dramatically committed partnership here. The Sérénade‘s pizzicato passages are genuinely spectral, and the finale has an almost febrile forward drive. Where some cellists make the Prologue stately, Queyras finds something more volatile — as if the music is searching, not settling. Emmanuel Pahud, Antoine Tamestit, and Xavier de Maistre in the Flute, Viola, and Harp Sonata have a silken ensemble quality that masks the music’s underlying slipperiness; their Pastorale opening is one of the most sustained pieces of collective chamber playing you’ll encounter in this repertoire.
Isabelle Faust’s Violin Sonata is something else again. Her intonation and phrase-shaping in the Allegro vivo are meticulous without being cold — you hear exactly what Debussy marked without the feeling that notes are being ticked off a list. Her tone is lean rather than rich, and that proves exactly right for music that prefers suggestion to statement. Perianes is an ideal partner: responsive, never self-congratulatory, always listening.
The recording itself is immaculate — Harmonia Mundi’s engineering captures an acoustic of warmth and clarity, and the balance between instruments in the trio sonata is handled with rare skill.
My Favorite Moment
The first three minutes of Queyras’s Sérénade in the Cello Sonata: the opening pizzicato line repeated twice, quietly, like a tap on the shoulder in a dark room. Perianes leaves just enough space before responding that you genuinely don’t know what comes next. The exchange between them in those bars has a wit and strangeness that makes you reconsider the whole work. This is the passage I come back to when I want to test whether a new recording of the piece has really taken the music seriously.
Comparisons
The Nash Ensemble — Debussy: String Quartet & Sonatas (Hyperion, 2025)
The Nash Ensemble’s 2025 Hyperion recording covers much of the same ground and adds the String Quartet and the David Walter chamber arrangement of the Faune, making it the more comprehensive portrait of Debussy’s chamber world. The Nash readings are warmer and perhaps less searching than these; in the Violin Sonata, Gonley’s impetuosity is a different kind of engagement from Faust’s cool precision. These two recordings make an ideal pairing.
Edgar Moreau, Bertrand Chamayou & Renaud Capuçon — Debussy: Sonatas and Piano Trio (Erato, 2017)
For a more historically-minded approach to the late sonatas, the recording by Renaud Capuçon, Edgar Moreau, and Bertrand Chamayou on Erato (Warner) is worth hearing: urgently played, particularly strong in the Cello Sonata, though it occasionally trades ambiguity for sweep.
