Alessandra Ammara – Debussy: Complete Piano Works Vol. 3

Principally surveying the Preludes and Images, the first two volumes of Alessandra Ammara’s Debussy survey have attracted praise for their affinity with the composer’s elusive but painterly idiom. According to Fanfare, ‘Ammara reveals her sensitivity to the Debussy sound world, rife with blurred outlines of objects and infiltrated with variegated light, in the manner of the painter J.M.W. Turner.’For Volume 3, her focus turns principally to the set of 12 Etudes which miraculously took shape over the course of just two months, in August and September 1915. Plagued by ill-health following the diagnosis of rectal cancer in 1909, presented with the pressing need to increase his earnings through editing and performing, Debussy wrote the Etudes while staying in a town near Dieppe, on the Normandy coast. Emerging from a period of severe depression, he once more took inspiration from the sea in a sudden and final burst of creativity which also saw the composi