Le tombeau de Claude Debussy is in effect a joint memorial published two years after the composer’s death in the renowned Parisian musical magazine La revue musicale, its contributors among the finest musical minds of the day. Ravel is represented by a five-minute movement that later became the first part of his feisty Sonata for violin and cello. In the context of this album’s programme – which extends to three additional ‘related works’ – we’re given the whole 20-minute Sonata played by Janna Gandelman and Dmitry Yablonsky, a good performance, if not quite on a par with the more playful version by the Capuçon brothers (Virgin/Erato, 5/02).

Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments is offered in its 1947 edition – the final chorale at its heart is one of the nine pieces that make up the main collection, which is almost exclusively for piano solo. Again, we’re given a solid performance under Zeev Dorman, reliable and well-paced but in comparison with, say, Boulez in Berlin (DG, 4/00), a mite wooden. Falla’s habanera-like Homenaje is more seductive as a guitar solo (Ruben Seroussi) than as a darker but equally effective piano piece (Tomer Lev). It’s a shame that given a total playing time of only 63'44", Lev didn’t supplement the seventh piece from Bartók’s Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs with a complete performance of the work, which plays for roughly 11 minutes and is one of the composer’s piano masterpieces.

The first piece is by Dukas, his final piano work, La plainte, au loin, du faune …, which to these ears more suggests Ravel’s ‘Le gibet’ (1908) than Debussy. Florent Schmitt’s Bergian ‘À la mémoire de Claude Debussy: et Pan, au fond des blés lunaires, s’accouda’ (Mirages) has a genuine sense of scale, whereas Sharon Rostorf-Zamir competently sings a gnomic Lamartine setting by Satie, and Malipiero’s Lento brings to mind a mirror image of Debussy’s ‘La cathédrale engloutie’. Eugène Goossens gave the British premiere of The Rite of Spring; his Hommage is charged with atmosphere. Roussel’s L’accueil des Muses reflects, in its lightness and clarity, Debussy’s love of Greek mythology. Although hardly world-beating, these are worthy performances, well recorded, in support of a musically valuable enterprise.