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Telegraph
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Follow my guide to Ravel's finest recordings
Having written about Maurice Ravel 's life just before the 150th anniversary of his birth last month, I wanted to look at recent recordings, and to recommend some from longer ago that show the composer's mastery to its utmost. One notable new recording is of his complete ballet Daphnis et Chloé, written between 1909 and 1912. By then, he had very much found his own voice, but was still under the impressionist influence of Debussy. The almost faultless new recording is compiled from two performances last year by the London Symphony Orchestra under Antonio Pappano. Pappano's immense talent as a conductor is unquestionable and there are numerous examples of the breadth of his range and depth of his insight in other recordings on the LSO Live label, whence this comes. Recently, John Wilson, another conductor who appears able to do no wrong, brought out a disc of orchestral works with the Sinfonia of London, on Chandos, which includes a stunning account of the composer's orchestration from 1919 of his piano masterpiece Le Tombeau de Couperin. Wilson, who has produced several first-rate Ravel recordings, judges the orchestral textures perfectly. He is well served, in a piece Ravel made into an instrumental showpiece, by an ensemble packed with virtuosi. As ever with Chandos, the sound engineering is superlative. The label has also issued a double album of Ravel's complete works for solo piano by Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, the Frenchman whose considerable abilities are overdue for proper recognition outside his home country. In my own extensive collection there are several Ravel recordings to which I return repeatedly, and I do not hesitate to recommend them. A rare pianist who surpasses Bavouzet is Samson François, a prodigy who died in 1970, aged just 46, after a life of excess, but whose abilities were astonishing. A six-CD box set includes not just the complete solo piano works but also Ravel's two piano concerti played by François with the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, conducted by the Belgian-born André Cluytens. The box set also includes Cluytens conducting the same orchestra in Ravel's complete orchestral works. One wants this set for François, but Cluytens's interpretations of Ravel's orchestral works are among the best available and show a deep understanding of the composer.
The Guardian
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Circa/LPO/Gardner review – Exhilarating, exquisite and extraordinary as Ravel melds with acrobatics
The Southbank Centre's cross-genre Multitudes festival opened with a double bill of Ravel's ballets Daphnis et Chloé and La Valse, played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Edward Gardner, and performed by the Australian company Circa with choreography by their artistic director Yaron Lifschitz. Circa's style amalgamates circus and acrobatics with contemporary dance, and the combination of athletic beauty, agility and strength suits Ravel uncommonly well. Rather than use the music as accompaniment to display, Lifschitz worked with the score rather than against it, though he dispensed with Daphnis et Chloé's narrative, replacing it with a sequence of contrasting abstract tableaux, now exhilarating,now erotic, always rooted in the pulse and throb of the music, played with exquisite finesse and detail by the LPO and Gardner throughout. Circa's acrobats, five women, five men, look like classical statues slowly coming to life in the Introduction, as their lifts and dives become ever more vertiginous. The Danse Guerrière became a spectacular contest of prowess between two men on a climbing frame, and in Chloé's Danse Suppliante, a woman hovered and swung with supreme grace in bolts of cloth high above the orchestra. The interlocking bodies of Lever du Jour, suggestive of ancient Greek friezes, were particularly beautiful, though the final Bacchanale, where the music turns orgiastic, eventually coalesces into an aggressive, unresolved standoff between two men. The sudden ambivalence, in fact, marked the transition to La Valse with its underlying sense of society careering towards its own destruction. The atmosphere was markedly different. Tracksuits and skirts replaced the clingy lacy outfits worn in Daphnis, and where the latter was danced in pools of light, all pastel shades and purple, the platform now glowed red. The choreography was again spectacular, if more closely woven: we're now aware of tautness and tension throughout. Routines began and ended in the formality of ballroom hold, which felt increasingly like a constraint, and Gardner ratcheted up the pressure as the waltz itself moved almost imperceptibly from suave elegance to something infinitely more troubling. Lifschitz's ending, meanwhile, with the 10 acrobats simultaneously performing a different spotlit dance was astonishing, but we were also suddenly and shockingly aware how isolated each had become. Powerful, beautiful stuff, and a most extraordinary evening.
The Guardian
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ravel: Fragments album review – Chamayou's piano dances and dazzles in a luminous birthday celebration
The 150th anniversary of the birth of Maurice Ravel has so far been one of this year's less noted musical anniversaries. Bertrand Chamayou's tribute, a supplement to the survey of Ravel's piano music that he recorded almost a decade ago, is characteristically fresh and original. As well arrangements of orchestral music (parts of Daphnis et Chloé, La Valse) by Ravel himself that were omitted from that earlier survey, this also includes Chamayou's own arrangements of songs, and tributes to Ravel that were composed by both his near contemporaries such as Joaquín Nin, Ricardo Viñes, Xavier Montsalvatge and Arthur Honegger, and by composers in the decades since his death. The most ravishing of those later pieces is Salvatore Sciarrino's De la Nuit, an intoxicating mashup of themes from the Ondine and Scarbo movements of Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit; Betsy Jolas's Signets also quotes from Gaspard, and so does Frédéric Durieux's Pour Tous Ceux Qui Tombent. Chamayou's performances of all these miniatures dance and dazzle, just as his accounts of the demanding, larger-scale arrangements, such as the Fragments Symphoniques de Daphnis et Chloé, manage to be both fabulously precise and luminously coloured. This is a must for Ravel lovers, hugely enjoyable for everyone else. Listen on Apple music (below) or Spotify This article includes content hosted on We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as the provider may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'.
