Music: The Emancipator

To many a casual concert goer, the name Claude Debussy suggests a moody, vaporous music of almost monotonous sweetness and grace. Anybody who ever sat down to a piano lesson has tinkled through Clair de Lune, and since the great Toscanini performances of the 1930s, it has been almost impossible to get through a concert season without at least one rendering of that virtuoso war horse La Mer. But there is another view of Debussy—one that audiences are being reminded of more and more often in the centennial year of his birth. Debussy was...

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