* DEBUSSY. Images pour Orchestre. L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande (Ansermet). Decca LXT2524 (12 in., 39S. fld.).

If I were recording manager for Decca —which I never shall be—I would make it my business to find out why it is that the L.P. discs made by Ansermet and the Suisse Romande are such streets ahead of everything else: is it due to the Victoria Hall at Geneva, is it a different recording technique, or is it simply the particular recording engineer ? Whatever the reason, this is an altogether outstanding issue, worthy to rank alongside that of the same performers' Petrouchka. The playing, too, as one might expect from so sympathetic and experienced an interpreter of Debussy as Ansermet, is admirable, and it brings out the basic clarity of form and outline which underlies the impressionist patterns of the orchestration. This is, moreover, the only disc (let me repeat, just for the pleasure of saying it, and with a glance at my ever-encroaching record racks, one thin disc) to contain all three orchestral Image.c together, so that one can study them in their proper context.

Debussy's first two sets of Images, for piano, date from 1905 and 1907: the third set, for orchestra, was originally conceived for -two-.pianos. Iberia and Rondes de printemps occupied the composer from 1906 to i gog, and Gigues, published as No. i, from 1909 to 1912, though he left the orchestration of this last incomplete, and the score as we know it is partly the work of André Caplet. Iberia is, of course, by far the best known of the set, and its