Its premise is candid and rather unusual. SoloArtStudio, founded by the producer Tolga Tümözen, exists to recreate the great works of the repertoire digitally, following the example of their most celebrated recorded interpretations, and to simulate the acoustics of a concert hall around them. Purists may bristle at the notion. I confess to arriving with folded arms. They unfolded within the first page.
The opening, in D-flat major, is pitched barely above a whisper, and the bar lines dissolve as Debussy intended. Mr Tümözen, who plays the piece himself, shapes the phrases with a patient, unforced touch. Nothing is hurried and nothing lingers for effect. The harmonies arrive layer upon layer, like washes of watercolour laid over one another, each allowed to dry before the next is applied. This is the right instinct. "Clair de lune" is ruined by pianists who caress every note as though it were a pedigree cat, and spared by those who trust the line to carry itself.
The central section, with its rippling arpeggios, is where the engineers and the pianist must collaborate most closely, and the partnership holds. The figuration shimmers rather than rattles, and the sustaining pedal blurs the harmony only as far as the score permits. The simulated hall does its part by lending the sound a sense of space and distance, so that the piano seems to sit in a room of genuine size, with air around it, instead of being pressed against the listener's ear. Headphones, the natural habitat of such a single, become less a pair of cans than a seat in the stalls.
Then comes the retreat. The music withdraws into stillness bar by bar, and the silences between the last notes are treated as part of the score, which they are. A recording that fears silence is a recording that has not understood Debussy. This one understands him very well.
It would be foolish to pretend this single displaces the great pianists who have made the piece their own. It does not try to. Its ambition is different and, in its way, more modest: to give a new audience, one that lives on streaming platforms and listens in the small hours, a faithful, beautifully lit introduction to a masterpiece. By that measure it triumphs. The playing is musical, the atmosphere is carefully judged, and the whole enterprise carries the unmistakable warmth of people who love what they are doing.
Dim the lamp, as the producers suggest, and press play. The moon, for four or five minutes, belongs to you. Warmly recommended.
