Ravel: Complete Songs album review – fine performances for the composer's 150th anniversary

The Guardian

10-04-2025

After collections devoted to Duparc, Fauré and Poulenc, pianist Malcolm Martineau adds Ravel to the surveys of French song he has curated for Signum, nicely timed for the composer's 150th anniversary this year. As before, Martineau is partnered by a lineup of mostly British singers, who tackle the songs as if determined to demonstrate that this repertoire should never be seen as the exclusive preserve of Francophone artists.
The settings, 37 of them altogether, are arranged chronologically across the two discs, from the Ballade de la Reine Morte d'Aimer (Ballad of the Queen Killed by Love), which Ravel composed in 1893 when he was just 18 but already showing the fastidious ear for texture and colour that would characterise all his music, to the three settings that make up Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, originally commissioned for a film by Pabst starring the great Russian bass Chaliapin, but belatedly completed in 1934, three years before Ravel's death.
Martineau is of course the common denominator through the discs, whether evoking the shimmering orchestral colours in the piano version of Shéhérazade (which does, though, recruit a flute for the second number, La Flûte Enchantée), the rustic humour of the Chants Mélodies Populaires Grecques, or the pictorial impressions of Histoires Naturelles, while the exquisite Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé are performed in Ravel's original instrumentation with the soprano partnered by two flutes, two clarinets and string quartet.
For many, though it will be the one-off songs, those that do not form part of a well-known cycle or set, that are the big discoveries here, whether it's the early, bleak setting of Verlaine, Un Grand Sommeil Noir from 1895, or the touching little Tripatos from 1909, an arrangement of a Greek folk song that Ravel composed after his father's death. But among the better known numbers there are some fine performances, as well as a few disappointments: the soprano Paula Murrihy brings a real sultry intensity to Shéhérazade, and baritone Simon Keenlyside finds precisely the right light touch for the epigrammatic Histoires Naturelles, while the mezzo Julie Boulianne proves more convincing in the Mallermé settings than she is in Chansons Madécasses, perhaps the greatest of all Ravel's vocal works. In the end, though, there are far more treats here than disappointments.
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