“Selten klangen Ravels hochartifizielle, „künstliche“ Paradiese so märchenhaft verzaubert und so feinstofflich orchestral aufgefächert wie hier”

RONDO MAGAZIN

“À chaque époque ses références, nul doute que celle s’inscrira dans le paysage discographique de notre temps”

CRESCENDO MAGAZINE

“Morlot lleva a la orquesta a espléndidos momentos. El primero de una serie prometedora”

REVISTA SCHERZO

“Morlot balances textures smartly throughout”

GRAMOPHONE MAGAZINE

“Excepcional. Esta integral, sin duda, apunta muy alto”

REVISTA RIMTO

“Una interpretación transparente y precisa”

REVISTA MELÓMANO

Barcelona Symphony Orchestra and Ludovic Morlot, its chief conductor, continue their recording adventure exploring the entire body of Maurice Ravel’s (1875–1937) orchestral works – with some added treats and the complicity of mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron and baritone Alejandro Duhamel in the solos of three important song cycles. Scheherazade was written in the early 20th century based on poems by the poet pompously nicknamed Tristan Klingsor – pen name of the versatile Léon Leclère, and under the influence of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, especially in the syllabic treatment of the voice. It is made up of three evocative songs of sublime beauty, and endowed with a magically atmospheric, fine and richly sophisticated instrumentation. Nor could it be otherwise, knowing its composer, one of the greatest orchestrators of all time who is also well known for being an admirer of the brilliant and colourful work of Rimsky-Korsakov, composer of another famous work of the same name. The first song, the panoramic oriental fantasy “Asie”, is the longest and most contrastive of the cycle. This is followed by the enchantingly modal “La flûte enchantée”, filled with a delicate breath of melancholy, and finally “L'indifférent”, with an eminently more vertical orchestral part, with clean and regular chords, which is the piece in which Debussy’s influence is perhaps the clearest.

Don Quichotte à Dulcinée is also a collection of three songs, in this case for baritone and classical orchestra (with harp) based on elegant and concise poems by the politically controversial Paul Morand. Composed in the last decade of the composer’s life, it was commissioned to become the music for a film, but was never used. The work is a series of sung dances with a Spanish flavour, an austere feel – an adjective which, speaking of Ravel’s sound universe, can also be considered a little odd – and a stern but calm intensity in tribute to Cervantes’s tragicomic hero. The “Chanson romanesque” is a guajira, with the alternation of 6/8 and 3/4 time signatures that Ravel had already used in other works; the “Chanson èpique” is a Basque zortico – the composer’s roots should not be forgotten here – and the “Chanson à boire”, a brilliant Aragonese jota.

Trois poèmes by Stéphane Mallarmé, for voice, two flutes, two clarinets, piano and strings, is a brief jewel of visionary sonorous imagination. They were written between April and August 1913, and in order to understand them better, it is worth remembering that a year earlier Arnold Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire had seen the light of day. Of the author of the poems, in a New York Times interview with Olin Downes in 1929, Ravel said: “I consider Mallarmé not only the greatest French poet, but the only one”. The first song opens with ethereal and undulating harmonics in strings bariolage, that gives way, as in a diptych, to a second section of sweeping harmonies in homophony with a short coda in which fragments of the initial texture resound again, miraculously suspended in the air. The second song, “Placet futile”, is a little more expressive, with an iridescent piano-dominated section right in the middle. In “Surgi de la croupe et du bond”, the sound field opens up – the first flute takes the piccolo and the second clarinet the bass clarinet – and a darker, more mysterious, carefully dissonant character emerges. The dedications to each of the pieces should not be forgotten: to Igor Stravinsky, composer of a contemporary Trois poésies de la lyrique japonaise with the same instrumentation; and to Florent Schmitt and Erik Satie, respectively.

As for purely instrumental music, there are three other pieces. The Menuet antique – written for piano and premièred by Ricard Viñes in 1895, and orchestrated by Ravel himself in 1929, a year after the composition of the Boléro –which, despite being an early piece and still indebted to a certain past style with an academicist air – as far as the basic material is concerned – already reveals a taste for the paradoxically diaphanous density of the musical and harmonic structures. The orchestration is a prodigy of chromatic subtleties. The “Fanfare” that Ravel wrote in 1927 as a prelude to the collaborative ballet L'éventail de Jeanne – in which Ferroud, Ibert, Manuel, Delannoy, Roussel, Milhaud, Poulenc, Auric and Schmitt also participated – is a very short piece of just 29 bars, but full to the brim with fantasy that with dotted and martial triple chopped rhythms, moves through all the instrumental families until it arrives at an abrupt tam-tam beat. And finally, another work that was also originally written for the piano: the eight Valses nobles et sentimentales, written in 1911 and orchestrated the following year, conceived in tribute to Schubert and his two compilations of Valsos nobles D 969 and Valsos sentimentales D 779. It is a brilliant and chamante work that already points towards one of the great masterpieces, not only of our composer, but of 20th century, which shortly afterwards would take a definitive form: La valse.

https://www.auditori.cat/en/album/ravel-2/