For Claude Debussy, the imaginative life was real life. A musical pantheist and revolutionary, he sensed the very heart of the centre of natural phenomena, their ‘inscape’ or essence; and seeking, as he put it, to ‘express the inexpressible’, he longed to liberate music ‘from the barren traditions that stifle it’. Such fantasy and freedom combine with a no less marked love of precision and finesse to give Debussy’s music and inimitable calibre and stature.Few overviews of Debussy’s piano music have been as consistently sastifying as Gordon Fergus-Thompson’s. Sensitively recorded, it is full of half-lights, colour and vibrancy. It won the MRA ‘Best Instrumental Recording of the Year’ and a Penguin Guide ‘rosette’ and has received rave reviews in the international press.