Maurice Ravel

Continuing their exploration of Ravel’s output, François-Xavier Roth and Les Siècles offer us two works linked by his love of Spain. Alongside the famous Bolero, which regains its original flavour here on period instruments, is Ravel’s first opera, which flirted with libertinism: though its outstanding cast consists entirely of native French-speakers, this caustic ‘Hour’ remains quintessentially Spanish!

These much-lauded performances deserve the highest possible recommendation. One example suffices to detail the level of Martinon’s interpretive perceptions. Ravel was, of course, a stunning orchestrator, and yet most of the music here was originally conceived for keyboard. The end of the Mother Goose ballet contains one of his rare orchestral miscalculations: the original glissandos for piano are given to the harp, which is almost never audible against the loud final climax–except here. Martinon, with his keen ear and evident knowledge of what Ravel intended, makes sure that the harp comes right through, and the result is magical. His textural awareness is matched by an equally natural sense of pacing, and the orchestra (not one of the world’s great ones) gives him 100 percent in music that it clearly knows and loves.

This stunning and generous collection belongs right at the top of the heap in its respective repertoire. The Debussy is still a comparative rarity in concert if not on disc, a remarkable fact given that it's wholly gorgeous from first note to last. Jean-Efflam Bavouzet's excellence as a Debussy pianist already has been acknowledged by just about everyone who has heard him, and needs no further advertisement here. The performance is outstanding, sensitive to every nuance, but also very French in its clear-eyed sensibility and understanding that focused rhythm and supple tempos prevent the music from turning excessively sentimental or blandly pretty. And in Tortelier, Bavouzet has a conductor who seconds him every step of the way. A similar sensibility informs these swift, razor-sharp, and utterly thrilling accounts of the two Ravel concertos. That for the left hand seldom has sounded so exciting, or in its jazzy central march section, so sinister. Listen to the bite that both soloist and orchestra bring to that descending scale theme, and notice the way Bavouzet shapes his cadenza so as to preserve the illusion of multiple parts played by multiple hands–all without slowing down at the tough passages. It's really an amazing performance by any standard. Even the dark opening, often merely murky on other recordings, has shape and urgency, the buildup to the initial entry of the piano creating incredible tension.

The Labèque sisters' recordings on the Philips and London labels from the early '80s, which were big hits, largely disappeared after their initial acclaim and, as of the early 2000s, were only found in excerpts on compilations. So as the big labels continue to abandon new classical recordings, the Labèques started their own record label, as many other artists have done, allowing them the freedom to choose what kind of music they want to record, whether it be standard piano duet repertoire or new interpretations of Lennon and McCartney.

Between 1803 and 1968, the Grand Prix de Rome marked the zenith of composition studies at the Paris Conservatoire. In Maurice Ravels time the competition included an elimination round (a fugue and a choral piece) followed by a cantata in the form of an operatic scena. The entries were judged by a jury which generally favoured expertise and conformity more than originality and Ravels growing reputation as a member of the avant-garde was therefore hardly to his advantage, and may explain why he never won the coveted Premier Grand Prix, and the three-year stay at Romes Villa Medici that went with it.

Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho releases the second album from his current Ravel project of the two piano concertos, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth (March 7). The album features the Concerto for the Left Hand, a notoriously difficult work that is notable for its dark sonorities, as well as the more lighthearted Concerto in G major that achieves an exquisite combination of jazz and the Classicism of Mozart and Saint-Saëns.

Widely regarded as his orchestral masterpiece, Maurice Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé was one of the most sumptuous scores written for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, and though it is most often performed as a concert piece today, it is well-loved for its gorgeous melodies, lush harmonies, and atmospheric tone colors. Yet most listeners are only familiar with the second of two suites Ravel extracted from the score, so they may not know the sweep and splendor of the work as a whole.

A solitaire in French is a single mounted jewel, a concept that seems less than apt for the rather hefty works recorded here by British pianist Kathryn Stott. But this fine recital holds together in another way: Ravel, who so often provides the temporal endpoint for traditional piano recitals, is here, to a greater or lesser extent, the launching point for the other three composers featured. Stott's reading of the neoclassical Le Tombeau de Couperin is beautifully precise and balanced, catching the economy of this Baroque-style suite to the hilt. That economy carries over into the later works, even the rarely performed Piano Sonata of Henri Dutilleux, a work that deftly fuses Ravel's sense of classical forms with a largely dissonant language. The opening Prelude and Fugue of Jehan Alain, actually two separate works that are reasonably enough combined here, is another seldom-played piece that makes an arresting curtain-raiser, and the final "Le baiser de l'Enfant Jésus" of Messiaen, part of the giant Vingt regards sur l'Enfant Jésus, is the splendid climax of the whole, its spiritual, dreamlike ascent at the end superbly controlled. Better still is the sound, recorded at Hallé St. Peters in Manchester: it creates a hypnotic effect all its own.