Happy birthday, Maurice Ravel, born on this day in 1875!

“Ravel is one of the rare French composers who have left so strong an imprint on their art that music after them can never be the same.” — Alexis Roland-Manuel.

Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) ranks as one of the most original French composers of his time, a consummate craftsman who continually sought perfection of form and style, and whose unique harmonic language was unmistakably his own. Along with Debussy, he stands in the front rank of great modern composers for the piano and his piano music includes a number of masterpieces considered vital to the repertoire of any serious pianist.

This handsome, great volume reprints a rich selection of his compositions: “Pavane pour une infante défunte, ” “Jeux d’eau, ” “Sonatine, ” “Miroirs, ” “Menuet antique, ” “Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn, ” “Gaspard de la nuit, ” and more.

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From the dazzling “Jeux d’eau,” whose inventiveness and harmonic ingenuity opened a whole new era in sound, to the beloved “Pavane pour une infante défunte,” to the suite “Gaspard de la nuit, ” music of legendary difficulty that every serious pianist eventually attempts. The piano music of Ravel is among the most recorded and performed in the repertoire.

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Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

Joseph Maurice Ravel (7 March 1875 – 28 December 1937) was a French composer, pianist, and conductor. He is often associated with Impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was internationally regarded as France’s greatest living composer.

Born to a music-loving family, Ravel attended France’s premier music college, the Paris Conservatoire; he was not well regarded by its conservative establishment, whose biased treatment of him caused a scandal. After leaving the conservatoire, Ravel found his own way as a composer, developing a style of great clarity and incorporating elements of modernism, baroque, neoclassicism and, in his later works, jazz. He liked to experiment with musical form, as in his best-known work, Boléro (1928), in which repetition takes the place of development. Renowned for his abilities in orchestration, Ravel made some orchestral arrangements of other composers’ piano music, of which his 1922 version of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition is the best known.

A slow and painstaking worker, Ravel composed fewer pieces than many of his contemporaries. Among his works to enter the repertoire are pieces for piano, chamber music, two piano concertos, ballet music, two operas and eight song cycles; he wrote no symphonies or church music. Many of his works exist in two versions: first, a piano score and later an orchestration. Some of his piano music, such as Gaspard la nuit (1908), is exceptionally difficult to play, and his complex orchestral works such as Daphnis et Chloé (1912) require skillful balance in performance.

Ravel was among the first composers to recognize the potential of recording to bring their music to a wider public. From the 1920s, despite limited technique as a pianist or conductor, he took part in recordings of several of his works; others were made under his supervision.

List of compositions by Maurice Ravel

Biography

Maurice Ravel (Ciboure, France, 1875 – Paris, 1937) French composer. Together with Debussy, with whom he usually relates, he is the great representative of the modern French musical school. Universally known to the bolero , its catalog, although not very extensive, includes a series of works to some extent little known that speak of a complex, almost mysterious author, which avoided any type of confession in its music. An author who conceived his art as a beautiful artifice, a magical and fictional enclosure away from reality and everyday concerns. Stravinsky successfully defined it as “the most perfect watchmaker of all composers”, and thus we must see his music: as the work of an artisan obsessed with the formal and technical perfection of his creation.

Born in the French Basque Country, he inherited from his father, a Swiss engineer, his fondness for mechanical gadgets – whose echoes are not difficult to find in his music. His mother, of Basque origin, his attraction for Spain, source of inspiration of many of its pages. Although he began his musical studies at a relatively late age, when he was seven years old, seven later, in 1889, he was admitted at the Paris Conservatory, where he received the teachings, among others, from Gabriel Fauré.

A discreet pianist, his interest soon focused on the composition, a field in which he showed a great originality from his first works. Such as the famous Pavane for a deceased infant is still noticeable, although in them the trace of his teacher Fauré and musicians such as Emmanuel Chabrier and Erik Satie.

The hearing of Debussy’s Prélude à l’Près-Midi d’un Faune, marked his immediately subsequent compositions, such as the Schéhérazade , although he soon turned away from foreign influences and found his own way of expression.

In 1901, he presented himself to the Rome Grand Prix, whose obtaining was a guarantee of the official consecration of the winner. He won the second prize with a cantata entitled Myrrha, written in a style that sought to adapt to the conservative tastes of the jury.

This style was not corresponded to the one that Ravel explored in works such as the pianist Jeux d’Eau, in which he started from the acute piano record of the piano new sounds. He participated three times, in 1902, 1903 and 1905, without ever getting the precious award. The last one, in which he was eliminated in the previous tests, caused a scandal in the press that even cost the director of the Conservatory.

Without the need for any official confirmation, Ravel was already a known and appreciated musician, especially thanks to his unique ability to treat instrumental color, bell. A quality that can be seen in a special way in its production destined for the orchestra, such as its Spanish Rhapsody, the Valse or its paradigmatic bolero. An authentic exercise of orchestral virtuosity whose interest lies in the way in which Ravel combines the different instruments, from the subtle pianissimo of the beginning to the final fortissimo. His camera music and the piano written also participates in these characteristics.

You have to point out, however, that this facet, even being the most widespread, is not the only one of this composer. Complex character, in him two opposing and complementary trends lived: hedonistic pleasure for the instrumental color and a marked tendency towards austerity that his most eloquent reflection had in his own life, which always developed in solitude, regardless of all social manifestation, dedicated entirely to the composition. Its two concerts for piano and orchestra, the first in minor re, bright and outgoing, the second in Sol Mayor, perfectly exemplify this dual character of their personality.

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Ravel: Complete Piano Music.

Maurice Ravel, while famous for his orchestral scores, and acknowledged as one of the great orchestrators also produced some of greatest piano works of the 20th century. Although he was no more than a fair pianist, his scores abound with very clear and precise instructions on how the work should be played. Dynamics, tempi, phrasing, and expression all must be clearly adhered to if the performer wishes to avoid coming to grief.

These instructions brought him into conflict with some artists – including Toscanini, but most notably with his friend Ricardo Vines, who said that to play ‘Le Gibet’ from Gaspard de la Nuit as Ravel instructed would bore the audience to death. ‘I do not want to be interpreted, I want to be played’ was the uncompromising answer.

The piano is the scene of some of his earliest music (the Menuet grotesque), some of his most simply affecting (the Pavane pour une infante défunte), his most spine-chilling (Gaspard de la Nuit) and his most charming (Tombeau de Couperin, written in memory of friends who perished in the First World War). All of it is here, and in a chronological order that enables the listener to follow Ravel’s own creative journey.

Michelangelo Carbonara is among the most outstanding of young Italian pianists. This was his first recording for Brilliant Classics: he is renowned in the central Austro-German repertoire but also specialises in the music of Polish composers from Chopin to Lutoslawski.

For Ravel, the piano was an orchestra in a box, with the capacity for almost infinite variety of tone colour and rhythmic subtlety. Composer: Maurice Ravel Artists: Michelangelo Carbonara (piano)

Tracklist:

0:00:00 Serenade Grotesque
0:03:20 Menuet Antique
0:09:31 Pavane Pour Une infante defunte
0:15:55 Jeux D’eau
0:21:43 Sonatine : I. Modere
0:25:50 Sonatine : II. Mouvement de Menuet
0:28:57 Sonatine : III. Anime
0:32:57 Menuet En Ut Diese Mineur
0:34:11 Miroirs: Noctuelles
0:39:16 Miroirs: Oiseaux Tristes
0:43:26 Miroirs: Une Barque Sur L’ Ocean
0:51:23 Miroirs: Alborada del Gracioso
0:58:04 Miroirs: La vallee des Cloches
1:04:05 Gaspard de La Nuit: I. Ondine
1:11:00 Gaspard de La Nuit: II. Le Gibet
1:18:27 Gaspard de La Nuit: III. Scarbo
1:28:28 Menuet Sur Le Nom de Haydin
1:30:09 Valses Nobles Et Sentimentales
1:31:27 Valses Nobles Et Sentimentales
1:34:03 Valses Nobles Et Sentimentales
1:35:28 Valses Nobles Et Sentimentales
1:36:38 Valses Nobles Et Sentimentales
1:37:51 Valses Nobles Et Sentimentales
1:38:31 Valses Nobles Et Sentimentales
1:41:11 Valses Nobles Et Sentimentales
1:45:28 Prelude
1:47:44 A La maniere de …: Borodine
1:49:28 A La maniere de …: Chabrier
1:51:28 Le Tombeau de Couperin: I. Prelude
1:54:41 Le Tombeau de Couperin: II. Fugue
1:58:11 Le Tombeau de Couperin: III. Forlane
2:04:46 Le Tombeau de Couperin: IV. Rigaudon
2:08:08 Le Tombeau de Couperin: V. Menuet
2:12:37 Le Tombeau de Couperin: VI Toccata