The French pianist Jean-Paul Gasparian has chosen Debussy for his first album with naïve, an album full of sensitivity and colour, including the first ever recording of the transcription of the Rondes de printemps.

With this album devoted solely to Debussy, Jean-Paul Gasparian invites listeners to integrate the atmospheres, colours and timbres that make up Debussy’s world. “The piano, here,” he says, “is a tool that lets your imagination wander, a machine that creates perceptions. Like a sort of stationary journey.”

It is also an opportunity for Jean-Paul Gasparian to show us another facet of his temperament, already seen in Rachmaninov and the Romantic repertoire, and return to his beginnings: a musical education from the great masters of the French school, who endowed him with its legacy, and a father who staunchly defended French music.

His father, incidentally, is also the author of the piano transcription of Rondes de printemps, one of the three Images pour orchestre, that this album produces for the first time on CD.

Throughout this recording, we find the challenge of sound: a sound that the pianist intended as “immaterial”, just like the style of the composer, said to have caressed the piano when he played.

A sound that imitates to perfection the crystalline textures and the ineffable poetry of these pieces whose programmes are suggested by the composer and intended as impressions rather than illustrations. These include the spellbinding Des sons et des parfums tournent dans l’air du soir, the magnificent La Cathédrale engloutie, and the playful Jardins sous la pluie, from Estampes.