Maurice Ravel: Undiscovered

Maurice Ravel was a fastidious composer, and almost certainly suppressed a great deal of his own music that he thought not up to standard. So although most of his published work is well-loved, there’s still a good deal which remains little known or which has only recently been discovered. His early and charmingly melodious Violin Sonata, composed in 1897, was not published until the centenary of the composer’s birth in 1975. And then there’s Ravel’s 1905 song Noël des jouets, setting his own text depicting a child-like view of a nativity made up of toys and a baby Jesus made of candy. By way of contrast, his more astringent Sonata for Violin and Cello (1922) has a roughness that reminds us of his sympathy with such modernists as Stravinsky and Bartók. Yet Ravel had an abiding sympathy with the gentler style of his teacher, Fauré, to whom he paid tribute in the same year in his touchingly simple yet haunting Berceuse sur le nom de Gabriel Fauré for violin and piano. That’s not to mention Ravel’s legendary genius as an arranger and orchestrator, not only of his own work (try the wonderfully atmospheric “Une barque sur l’ocean”), but also of works by composers he admired such as Debussy and Chabrier. Both his orchestrations of Debussy’s early “Danse” and Chabrier’s “Menuet Pompeux,” both originally piano pieces, are typically playful and detailed in his instrumental colouring. Perhaps least expected is Ravel’s arrangement not for orchestra, but for piano of Delius’ opera Margot la rouge: the “Duet” from this reveals a rarely noticed affinity in the harmonies and melodic cut between the French composer and his more senior English contemporary.