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Principally surveying the Préludes 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, InchAmmara 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.InchFor Volume 3, her focus turns principally to the set of 12 Études, 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 Études 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 composition of the suite for two pianos, en blanc et noir, and the Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp.However, it is the 12 Études which have come both to define Debussy's late style - on the piano, as a counterpart to his ballet for Diaghilev, Jeux - and to present both a model and a challenge to later composers of piano études from Tansman to Ligeti. Debussy himself said that they were Incha warning to pianists not to take up the musical profession unless they have remarkable handsInch.While the dry titles of the individual Études serve to conceal their rich and turbulent inner landscape, aspects of their invention are prefigured by the earlier works on Alessandra Ammara's album. The three movements of Estampes are as much InchstudiesInch in their way as the Études - of particular kinds of movement refracted through the images of a Japanese pagoda, a Spanish evening, and a garden in the rain. From 1904, and capturing t
