Ravel Fragments
Works by Ravel, Tansman et al
Bertrand Chamayou (piano)
Erato 2173260123 58:31 mins
Clip: Ravel – Vocalise-étude en forme de Habanera, M. 51 (Transcr. Chamayou for Piano)
Ravel was a fastidious composer, but not a very accomplished pianist: biographer Roger Nichols quotes the daunting review that ‘only a supreme ironist would consent to play his own beautiful music in public as badly as Ravel plays it’. But Ravel nevertheless made keyboard transcriptions of his orchestral works, including fragments from Daphnis et Chloé, which the marvellous pianist Bertrand Chamayou (who has already recorded all Ravel’s original piano music) has now assembled into an imaginative collection of original and tribute pieces, including a couple of his own new transcriptions.
With most of the 15 tracks two or three minutes long, I feared this would be a bitty collection, but I reckoned without Chamayou’s meticulous planning: the Daphnis extracts frame the varied colours of Alexandre Tansman’s tiny but powerful Prélude No. 5 (Hommage à Maurice Ravel), Joaquin Nin’s Spanish-tinged Mensaje a Ravel, polytonal Betsy Jolas and more conventional Arthur Honegger, all perfectly characterised. Salvatore Sciarrino splashes the keyboard with sea foam in De la nuit, while the least-known composer is surely Frédéric Durieux, whose homage piece sounds stuck in a hypnotic groove.
But it shows the cleverness of Chamayou’s sequence that the grumbling bass of Durieux’s conclusion leads seamlessly into the subterranean start of the album’s longest and finest track, a piano version of Ravel’s La valse which sounds as if at least six hands are at work. This is a titanic, gripping account of this tumultuous piece, combining impact with warmth and projecting with absolute clarity the collapse of civilization around us. A timely vision. Nicholas Kenyon