Ravel Bolero

On October 25, Peral Music releases its latest album, celebrating twenty years of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. In August 1999, Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra as a workshop for Israeli, Palestinian, and other Arab musicians to promote coexistence and intercultural dialogue. In order to celebrate this significant anniversary, Peral Music releases a digital album featuring “Don Quixote” (Richard Strauss) with cellist Kian Soltani and the famous “Boléro”(Maurice Ravel).

Record of American conductor, pianist and composer Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) leading the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in a work dedicated to the great French composer J. Maurice Ravel. Bernstein was one of the largest and most popular directors, one of the most powerful composers and a talented pianist of the last century. Gained fame over a long career of nearly five decades, marked with an endless list of awards, medals and other honors. He led the New York Philharmonic (one of the five major American symphony orchestras) between 1958 and 1969.

"Ravel on period instrument brings results of striking clarity... this is the perfect showcase for period instruments from the early 20th century. With Claire Chevalier a most sensitive soloist, very French in style, the piano is more clearly defined over the highly original, generally low-lying orchestration, growling up from nowhere at the start."

Edward Greenfield, Gramophone Magazine / October 2006

Daniel Barenboim was born in Buenos Aires on November 15, 1942, into a family of Ukrainian Jewish descent. Daniel's mother was his first piano teacher; he later studied with his father, Enrique Barenboim, who was an eminent music professor

Maurice Ravel - Bolero, La Valse & Other Works
Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra / Jesus Lopez-Cobos
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 208 MB | Full Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Telarc # CD-80171 | Country/Year: US 1988
Genre: Classical | Style: Romantic, Early 20th Century

"…The recording does, in fact, have a very wide dynamic range – not much use for playing in the car, where the soft passages would be drowned by road noise, unless you have a top-of-the-range limo, and the louder sections would seriously impair your driving, like the head-banging bass sounds one hears, usually emanating from black cars with heavily tinted windows. With ironic inevitability, the moment I typed those words I was disturbed by just such a noise from a car in a traffic queue outside! Even in domestic situations it is hard to cope with such a wide range; most of us have neighbours to consider and, even with good loudspeakers, quieter passages lack presence if played at a lower volume…"

Boléro, composed by Maurice Ravel in 1928, has always captured the world’s attention. Repetitive, mesmeric, colourful and thrilling, it has also proved a seminal work, influencing composers over the past century. Now it lends its name to a film inspired by the life of Ravel: directed by Anne Fontaine and starring Raphaël Personnaz.