Debussy’s piano music is perfectly conceived for the instrument. But it isn’t just that it fits beautifully under the hand or sounds wonderful as the vibrations leave the soundboard and enter the ear. To play the opening of “Reflets dans l’Eau” (from “Images,” Book One) feels as if the composer has transplanted his fingerprints onto the pads of your digits. The way the chords are placed on the keys (flat-fingered on the black notes) is not so much a vision of reflections, whether trees, clouds or water lilies. It is as if each three-padded triad is an actual laying of a flower onto the water’s surface.

Later in the piece, as the waters become more agitated, the cascading arpeggios are like liquid running through the fingers, all shimmer and sparkle. In “Poissons d’Or” (from “Images,” Book Two), the opening motive, a darting duplet of double thirds, is like trying to catch a fish’s flip as it slips out of the finger’s grasp. And in the central section, the slinky tune slithers with grace notes as the hand has to slide off the key as if off the scales of a freshly caught trout. In the first piece of this set, “Cloches à Travers les Feuilles,” the fingers are required to tap the keys (pedal held down, fingers pulled up) as if mallets against a bell.