Maurice Level

Choir leader, singing teacher, singer and composer, Maurice Bourbon leads three vocal ensembles as the art director of the Chapelle des Flandres Association - Métamorphoses, a vocal ensemble of international soloists, Coeli et Terra, a top-level chamber choir, and Biscantor!, a vocal ensemble of young adults, founded respectively in 1983, 1987 and 2005.

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.

Once upon a time in Algeria… a streetwise teenage boy started playing piano in the bars of Oran’s Jewish Quarter. It was 1942 and American GIs were in town bringing with them the sounds of Boogie-Woogie, Jazz and Cuban rhythms. Maurice El Médioni was that boy, soaking up those musical influences and, adding French chanson, Andalusian and Arabic styles to the mix, growing to become one of the pioneers of Algerian Raï music, playing for some of the biggest names of the golden era and his influence acknowledged by the stars of today such as Khaled and Rachid Taha. Now, with a band featuring Salamat’s Mahmoud Fadl and the Klezmatics’ David Krakauer and Frank London, the man is back in the spotlight at the Café Oran.