Ravel spent his whole life — short by some measures, long by the standards of his own productivity — as a miniaturist who kept discovering how large a small thing could become. The Bolero, seventeen minutes of obsessive repetition that he called a “piece for orchestra without music,” is maybe the ultimate proof of that paradox. But the disc under consideration here is really about something more interesting than the Bolero, which arrives at the end like a punctuation mark everyone already knows.
Leonard Slatkin took the reins in Lyon in 2011, and this first installment of a projected complete Ravel orchestral survey is, in the best sense, an honest piece of work. Slatkin has always been a director more comfortable in the middle of a score than at its edges — he finds the architecture, marks the transitions, keeps the ensemble clean. What he doesn’t always find is the thing under the surface. The shimmer. That particular heat.
Take the Rapsodie espagnole. The work began its life, in part, as a piano duet — Ravel recycled the “Habanera” movement from a piece he’d written for two pianos a full decade before the orchestral version — and it carries within it that dual citizenship, that sense of something written first for the fingers and then reimagined for a hundred players. Slatkin’s “Prélude à la nuit” does float, does create the right quality of suspended dark, and the Lyon strings are warm and well-blended. The “Malagueña” crackles. But the “Habanera” — which should feel humid, almost airless, like a room where no window has been opened in years — comes off merely dreamy, too comfortable, the dangerous undertow smoothed away. And in the “Feria,” the rhythmic pointing is blunt where it should be keen.
Comparison with Charles Dutoit’s 1981–82 Montreal recordings — still, thirty-plus years later, the standard against which everything in this repertoire must be measured — is not quite fair to Slatkin, but it’s unavoidable. Dutoit caught Ravel’s Spain at a particular angle of light: not ethnographic Spain but Ravel’s Spain, the Spain of a Basque-born Frenchman who visited the country only once and found his version of it more vivid than the original. The Orchestre symphonique de Montréal in those years had an edge in the strings, a reediness in the woodwinds — and Decca’s engineering at Saint-Eustache gave it all a spatial clarity that the Naxos sound in Lyon, warmer and less defined, doesn’t quite replicate.
The Alborada del gracioso — “morning serenade of the jester,” originally the fourth of the Miroirs piano pieces, orchestrated with spectacular mischief in 1918 — is where Lyon’s woodwinds get their best workout on this disc. The bassoon cadenza, one of the more gratuitously difficult passages in the orchestral literature, is dispatched with credit. Slatkin emphasizes the Basque snap in the rhythms. Still. Dutoit found something rawer, more impudent, in the same notes.
The Pavane pour une infante défunte is an early work — 1899, Ravel was barely twenty-four — and despite the composer’s later claim that it was just a pleasant exercise in pastiche, named for the sound of the words rather than any particular dead princess, it has outlasted a great many more ambitious pieces. The orchestration, done a decade after the piano original, is miraculously judicious — nothing is over-colored. Slatkin is careful here, perhaps too careful. The horn solo at the opening needs a certain plaintive quality, a sense of something half-remembered, that this interpretation only partially achieves.
A real rarity on this program is the Shéhérazade overture of 1898 — not the famous Duparc-adjacent song cycle with Klingsor texts that Ravel wrote four years later, but an entirely separate early concert overture, youthfully Rimsky-ish, that gets performed almost never. That alone justifies some attention to this disc. Slatkin is sympathetic. The Menuet antique, from even earlier — 1895, a student piece — is similarly treated with affectionate care, though one can hear Slatkin straining to make it more interesting than it actually is.
Jennifer Gilbert is the soloist in Arthur Hoérée’s arrangement for violin and orchestra of the Vocalise en forme de habanera, a miniature — three minutes — that Ravel wrote as a sight-reading exercise for the Paris Conservatoire. Gilbert plays it gracefully, with a tone that is pleasant if not especially distinctive.
And then the Bolero. Slatkin paces it well, builds it steadily, and the Lyon players execute their solo turns with professionalism. But the Bolero, at bottom, succeeds or fails on whether the conductor has understood its fundamental strangeness — that it is not a crescendo with a tune, but a study in the psychology of inevitability, of compulsion, of something that cannot stop itself. Slatkin’s version is well-made. It does not disturb you. Ravel’s should.
A useful disc, then, and the Naxos price point makes it easy to recommend for listeners building a library. But for anyone who already knows Dutoit’s Montreal set, this is supplementary rather than essential — capable Ravel from Lyon, warmly recorded, and only occasionally touched by whatever it is that makes this music irreplaceable.
