Includes song(s) by Maurice Ravel. Soloists: Inva Mula-Tchako, Valérie Millot, Claire Brua, Gérard Théruel, Laurent Naouri, David Abramovitz.

Günther Herbig knew the Berlin Symphony Orchestra well, even before being made Principal Conductor in 1977 of what is now the Konzerthaus orchestra. He had deputized in that post from 1966 to 1972. Solo flautist Richard Waage, an orchestra member from 1961 to 2002, also valued the work ethic of his Principal Conductor – notably when it came to the execution of solo parts. “With Herbig things were ‘more open’, when you had worked your way into a certain context, than with other conductors. He allowed you more freedom.” On one occasion when he had the opportunity to see Herbig’s conducting score, he was impressed by how every harmonic step was marked, so that the score bore traces of a musicological analysis. Solo flautist Richard Waage, an orchestra member from 1961 to 2002, also valued the work ethic of his Principal Conductor – notably when it came to the execution of solo parts. “With Herbig things were ‘more open’, when you had worked your way into a certain context, than with other conductors. He allowed you more freedom. You could offer more as an individual. I liked that a lot.” On one occasion when he had the opportunity to see Herbig’s conducting score, he was impressed by how every harmonic step was marked, so that the score bore traces of a musicological analysis. “This was the mathematical impulse” characteristic, he judged, of Herbig’s way of working. This architectural, formally structured approach to the music fitted well with the recording technique of those days, which did not allow breakdown into such small steps as today. Arches of tension thus sound more plausible, because there are fewer pieces to put together. “When you have long takes, of course that makes it all more organic,” concludes Richard Waage. It will surely have been these working conditions and the conductor’s specific style that made it possible, even in such an unpretentious piece as the Pavane, “to bring out the character of mourning”, which so moved Jürgen Kögel and other participants. This recording contains Ravel’s symphonic works La Valse, Ma Mère l'Oye, Pavane pour une infante défunte and last but not least the famous Bolero.

"I’m convinced that Perlemuter’s Ravel is the best of him in [his] Nimbus recordings, more even than the raft of Chopin performances. Miroirs is a delight; Noctuelles is full of evocative precision, and the poetic sensitivity he evinces is propelled with unselfconscious control in these early, 1973 recordings made in the studio. Textual control radiates outwards from these traversals. As for Gaspard there’s a total lack of fuss in Ondine – but the avoidance of artifice is a function of the poetic hauteur that gives such meaning to his playing. His Sonatine is crisp, the Valses animated by an especially witty Vif whilst Le Tombeau de Couperin moves with grace and deft accentuation, a notch slower than the BBC 1970 broadcast that has circulated. Seeking an analogue, this is the kind of pointillist playing George Copeland brought to Debussy, in contradistinction to Gieseking’s Turneresque wash; both wonderful but both very different. Perlemuter’s Ravel is a breath of fresh air."

-- Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb International

This album gives an interesting overview of Ravel's orchestral output, with a mixed programme of works from different periods of his career. The outstanding soloists are soprano Arleen Aug�r and violinist Pina Carmirelli; conductor Ernest Bour presents wonderfully nuanced performances. Some of Ravel's most famous pieces are featured, including a beautiful interpretation of his song cycle Sheherazade, which tells the story of the narrator of The Arabian Nights. Another notable inclusion is Daphnis et Chloe Suites 1 and 2. Daphnis et Chloe began as a one act ballet by Ravel, and was later adapted by the composer into the two Suites heard here. This album is part of a new re-release series (Century Classics) consisting of SWR music bestsellers. The series is competitively priced, optically highly attractive and contains acclaimed SWR recordings mostly of the SWR orchestras and their chief conductors.

This is an audio-only (i.e., with no video content) Blu-ray disc playable only on Blu-ray players.

It is also available on standard CD.

Maurice Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales present a vivid mixture of atmospheric impressionism, intense expression and modernist wit, his fascination with the waltz further explored in La valse, a mysterious evocation of a vanished imperial epoch. Heard here in an orchestration by Marius Constant, Gaspard de la nuit is Ravel’s response to the other-worldly poems of Aloysius Bertrand, and the dance suite Le tombeau de Couperin is a tribute to friends who fell in the war of 1914–18 as well as a great 18th-century musical forbear. ‘It is a delightful and assorted collection…presented in splendid performances by the Orchestre National de Lyon led by their music director, the venerable American conductor Leonard Slatkin.’

Daphnis et Chloe, generally regarded as Ravel's masterpiece, is one of the numerous important scores that owe their existence to the famous ballet impresario Sergey Diaghilev, who commissioned new works for his Paris-based troupe.

RAVEL:ORCHESTERWERKE

Take a large spoonful of Bolero, add a small amount of Pavane, simmer in the heat of Feria, then mix with a little Blues and you have the perfect Ravel. It's the recipe for success in the 'Best of' market, particularly when you have Naxos's stunning performances. What did the critics say when the discs, from which this compilation is taken, were first issued. "The whole performance, throbbing with life, makes you listen afresh", was the Gramophone's view of Thiollier's performance of the Piano Concerto. "Superbly recorded", was the Penguin Guide to Compact Discs accolade for Ma m_re l'oye, while Fanfare adds the Rapsodie Espagnole is "well conceived, executed and recorded".

This album is the fifth and final installment of Maurice Ravel's Orchestral Works, bringing to a close the highly acclaimed cycle by the Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart and its chief conductor Stephane Deneve. Ravel's opera L'enfant et les sortileges is the second of his two operas and is considered a neglected masterpiece. The libretto is by the famous French author Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette.

Riccardo Chailly pays tribute to Maurice Ravel with a program of waltzes and wild reveries of ecstasy and elegance. He ushers us into Ravel's musical worlds filled with ever-changing colors, scents, and flavors: the pulsating three-quarter time of waltzes that reflect just how much the Great War transformed European culture, the ancient love story of Daphnis and Chlo�, and the relentless rhythms of Bol�ro. Magnifique! Riccardo Chailly, who was born in 1953 in Milan, studied at the Conservatories of Perugia, Rome, and Milan and at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana, beginning his career as an assistant to Claudio Abbado at La Scala in Milan. Chailly was appointed Music Director of the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra in 1980, and in 1988 he moved to the same position with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, which he helmed for sixteen years. From 2005 to 2016, Riccardo Chailly served as head of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra; starting in 2015, he became Music Director of La Scala in Milan, and since the summer of 2016 he has held the position of Music Director of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra.

Riccardo Chailly pays tribute to Maurice Ravel with a program of waltzes and wild reveries of ecstasy and elegance. He ushers us into Ravel's musical worlds filled with ever-changing colors, scents, and flavors: the pulsating three-quarter time of waltzes that reflect just how much the Great War transformed European culture, the ancient love story of Daphnis and Chlo�, and the relentless rhythms of Bol�ro. Magnifique! Riccardo Chailly, who was born in 1953 in Milan, studied at the Conservatories of Perugia, Rome, and Milan and at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana, beginning his career as an assistant to Claudio Abbado at La Scala in Milan. Chailly was appointed Music Director of the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra in 1980, and in 1988 he moved to the same position with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, which he helmed for sixteen years. From 2005 to 2016, Riccardo Chailly served as head of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra; starting in 2015, he became Music Director of La Scala in Milan, and since the summer of 2016 he has held the position of Music Director of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra.

It is Vincent Larderet's passion and artistic goal to achieve such musical and pianistic accuracy through a close reading of the annotations in Perlemuter's own edition of Ravel's works. Larderet focuses on two critical aspects of Ravel's musical language: firstly, the composer's engagement with various traditions of virtuosity and secondly, Ravel's specific ideas regarding orchestration and the orchestral character of his piano style.

Ravel, M.: Gaspard De La Nuit / Miroirs / Jeux D'Eau

In residence at Chapelle Musicale Reine Elisabeth with the Artemis quartet, the Dali trio is a French ensemble of an exceptional level, rewarded with numerous prizes in Japan, Germany and the Unites-States in 2008. Amandine Savary, Vineta Sareika and Christian-Pierre La Marca, adding to their intense solo schedule, devote a large part of their wonderful energy to make up the trio, which is already leading them to the four corners of the world. By capturing the brilliance of their youthfulness, the subtleties of their tones, and their apparently endless quest for perfection, Fuga Libera and Chapelle Musicale Reine Elisabeth have cooperated to make known one of tomorrow's great trios, in a repertoire comprising three summits of Maurice Ravel's production.

Alice Ader’s first Debussy disc (Erato) won all the awards in the specialist press on its release twenty years ago and is still regarded as an unequalled benchmark. Now this unconventional pianist at last unveils her recording of the complete Ravel piano works. And what better moment could there be than Debussy Year to present these two hours or so of music in dialogue, en Miroirs as it were, with the œuvre of ‘Claude de France’? Ravel, the hot-blooded Swiss watchmaker, the discreet Lisztian, the mediocre pianist who made such extreme demands on his colleagues, the man of so many sublime paradoxes, deserves only the finest interpreters: those who take the time to explore his deepest recesses. Alice Ader, light-years away from the flashy gestures often encountered in this music, takes us to the very heart of one of the most secretive composers of his time.

Conducted by Philippe Jordan, this recording of Ravel's complete score for Daphnis et Chlo� followed performances of the ballet at Op�ra Bastille in Paris. The staging evoked the heady days of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes as it brought together Jordan, the choreographer Benjamin Millepied and the designer Daniel Buren. Jordan had never conducted a ballet production before: "When I work on a symphony, it's different," he said, "Here, the sense of phrasing, the physicality that dancers bring, make it something else. "Completing the CD is another work by Ravel that was originally conceived for Diaghilev's Ballets Russe, the intoxicating and haunting La Valse. Famously, Diaghilev rejected the score after it was first played to him in a two-piano reduction; the performers were Ravel himself and the legendary Marcelle Meyer.

Piano Music: Grand-Mondain

"These are extremely fine recordings, topped only by Boulez himself on DG, performances not necessarily "better", but certainly sonically superior. Still, I retain a marginal preference for this ebullient and harrowing La Valse, and the super-precise and super-cool Cleveland interpretation of the Rapsodie is unique. Whether those qualities are what you want in this particular piece is very much a matter of personal choice; in his Berlin remake, Boulez put a little more meat on the music's bones. Boléro builds to a massively powerful climax...The sound suits the different orchestras: chamber-like in Cleveland, big and even boomy in New York, with a touch of glassiness to the strings in louder passages. At less than full price, this is an extremely good deal, even if you already have tons of Ravel in your collection." [4/20/2006]

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com Reviewing earlier release

To music lovers throughout the world, the Marlboro Music festival represents a unique gathering place for some of the most distinguished and gifted musicians of our time. founded in 195I, Marlboro has come to be recognized as perhaps the world’s only fully professional center for advanced musical studies. Located at the end of a country road in the beautiful Green Mountains of Vermont, Marlboro is a place where the young professional and the master artist rehearse and perform together on an equal basis. There, everyone can get away from normal routines and pressures to explore together new repertoire, exchange ideas, and cultivate the art of chamber music. In the words of one critic, this extraordinary community of artists has become “perhaps the highest concentration of artistic activity, of whatever kind, that takes place anywhere, anytime, in the U.S. and possibly the world.”

The stage works of Maurice Ravel are as delicate and poised as one could imagine. In the Spanish-shaded L’heure espagnole, Ravel gives new vitality into the opera buffa by making the comedic element human, and giving the plot poignancy. Ravel wrote clear vocals, harmonic magic, and radiant orchestration. He imbues Cervante’s famous character with blue-blooded Spanish swagger, while still giving him a sort of heroic kindness and openness.

This three-disc set is part of the 25-disc box set Un siècle de musique fracaise, which explores French music from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. These discs profile French composer Maurice Ravel, and include his famous Concertos for piano, and orchestral works.

Listen to the Naxos Podcast to learn more about this release

Composed for Sergey Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Ravel’s ‘symphonie chorégraphique’ Daphnis et Chloé is based on a classical Greco-Roman love story set on the island of Lesbos. He described the work as ‘a vast musical fresco’, and with its extraordinarily passionate music, lush harmonies and orchestration, is considered both his masterpiece and the epitome of Impressionism in music. Orchestrated from the third of his Miroirs for piano, Ravel’s Une barque sur l’océan is an evocative portrayal of the ever-changing moods of the sea.

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REVIEWS:

This performance and recording comes close to fulfilling all of Ravel’s requirements. Slatkin paces the score admirably, even when he sets a spanking pace for the opening of the pirates’ dance. The orchestra find no difficulties in coping with the articulation of the notes here or in the final dance. I would put this Daphnis high on the list of currently available recordings.

– MusicWeb International

The shimmering orchestration and lush harmonies that epitomize impressionism are lovingly rendered by Slatkin and the French orchestra. While Daphnis et Chloé is most often presented as two suites for orchestra, this performance also includes the atmospheric choral parts, sung by Spirito, a body consisting of the Choruses and Soloists of Lyon and the Britten Chorus. Naxos provides remarkably clear and deep sound, so the finer points of Ravel’s scores are easily heard.

– All Music Guide

Florian Uhlig‘s recent recording of French Piano Concertos created a sensation. Though originally conceived as a respite from his ongoing project to record the first, truly complete edition of the piano works of Robert Schumann, Mr. Uhlig’s excursion into late 19th and 20th century French repertoire demonstrated his knack for the brilliant, urbane sound-world of the great French composers. He continues his explorations in this new recording of the piano works of Maurice Ravel.

Composed between 1929 and 1931, Ravel's two piano concertos reflect his enthusiasm for jazz, though one that was thoroughly absorbed into his own idiom. The Concerto in G major, originally conceived as a Basque rhapsody, is lightly scored but sports a vivacious percussion section, galvanizing motor rhythms and a slow movement of astonishing beauty. The Concerto for the Left Hand, commissioned by Paul Wittgenstein who had lost his right arm in the First World War, is a single movement tour de force, as is Tzigane, a gypsy violin showpiece of dazzling virtuosity.

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