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
