André Hellé had lavishly illustrated his original scenario in a charmingly child-like style; Yoshiko used these pictures, along with brief narrative text, in a computer presentation displayed on the projection screen. From cues in their parts, the players could ‘turn the pages’ in synchronisation with the music via five strategically placed, foot-operated switches. Delightful as was this visual element, it was all but eclipsed by the mesmerising musical performance.

This Toy-Box being a work of Debussy’s maturity, he inevitably deployed his unique, specifically pianistic soundworld. Hence, arranging it for (and playing it on) marimba, vibraphone and sundry other percussion presents a huge challenge. From the outset, DS generated a real feeling of enchantment. The ‘keyboard’ percussion (obviously) carried the melodic and harmonic argument, with other instruments used purely for adding touches of colour.

Spellbound as I was by the performance as a whole, my attention was particularly attracted to those mysterious, dreamy episodes (such as Moonlit Night), where Debussy ‘blurs’ his music (the very technique, I suppose, that provoked that ‘impressionist’ tag); these DS rendered entirely idiomatically and with consummate artistry, significantly reducing the expressive gap between piano and ‘keyboard’ percussion.

To my mind, the secret of DS’s success lay largely in a highly sophisticated sense of touch, evident as finely resolved control over an unusually wide dynamic range, which of course was most noticeable at the quiet end. Thus, in the aforementioned ‘dreamy’ episodes, they typically pared down the sound to the merest whisper, merging the struck notes with their accumulating, overlapping resonances. Whether or not this explanation is correct, that was the audible effect, the consequence of refining their instrumental techniques to render them capable of true expressive subtlety. This recital was nothing like what I had expected – instead it was a revelation.

Paul Serotsky, Whangarei, 2023