Pianist Ikuyo Nakamichi is known for her Beethoven performances, but she has also performed Chopin's piano music with multimedia accompaniment and, occasionally, Debussy. This set of the Preludes and Images, with a vigorous concluding L'isle joyeuse, isn't exactly the kind one would pick for a multimedia presentation, for Nakamichi doesn't lean heavily on the atmospherics. When she deploys abundant pedaling, it's in the service of images that are specifically supposed to be hazy in some way, as in La cathédrale engloutie or Cloches à travers les feuilles. Elsewhere, Nakamichi's textures are clear and her articulation detailed. Her goldfish (Poissons d'or) are little flashes of light in the pond, not inhabitants of a deep watery realm, and many of the Preludes benefit from careful tracing of structural and motivic details. It would be too much to call this a Beethoven specialist's Debussy, but it may reflect Nakamichi's primarily German and Japanese training rather than French traditions. None of which is meant as criticism, just as a suggestion to sample to see what one is getting into; the performance is distinctive, and RCA's sound, from a live performance in Tokyo at the Toyo Bunkakaikan Recital Hall in the fall of 2020, is impressively clear and immediate.