Ravel Violin Works – Lina Tur Bonet

There used to be a parlor game among violinists — who really understood Ravel’s writing for their instrument, and who merely admired it from a respectful distance. Ravel himself, notoriously, professed to think the violin and piano didn’t blend, that they were fundamentally incompatible partners forced into an uneasy marriage. And yet he kept writing for the combination anyway, kept consulting his friend Hélène Jourdan-Mourhange — “Moune” to those who loved her — about bowings, about what would actually work under the fingers. This new disc, recorded in the resonant hall of Brussels’s Musical Instruments Museum, makes her presence felt as something more than a dedication page footnote.

Lina Tur Bonet plays on gut strings here, which matters more than you’d think. The sound loses that steely brilliance we’ve come to expect from modern set-ups — no chrome, no glare — and gains something huskier, more vulnerable, occasionally even a little raw at the top of the bow. Paired with Pierre Goy’s 1935 Hautrive piano, an Art Déco instrument with a drier, more veiled tone than any Steinway concert grand, the whole enterprise takes on a sepia cast. You can practically smell the beeswax and cigarette smoke of a 1920s Paris salon.

The “Berceuse sur le nom de Gabriel Fauré,” barely two minutes long, functions here less as throat-clearing than as an atmospheric overture — Ravel’s tender tribute to his teacher, built from a musical cryptogram of Fauré’s name, floats by with a hushed, almost improvisatory tenderness. Then the Sonata for violin and piano, that strange, spiky, harmonically slippery piece from the mid-1920s. The first movement’s bitonal games — G major shadowed by its own dissonant twin — come across with real clarity in this recording, neither smoothed over nor overemphasized. The “Blues” movement is the calling card, of course, and Tur Bonet doesn’t oversell the jazz idiom the way some fiddlers do, all slides and swagger; she lets the syncopations speak plainly, almost dryly, which paradoxically makes them funkier.

Then comes the Tzigane, and everything changes.

Most performances give you violin and piano, full stop, four minutes of unaccompanied virtuosic throat-clearing followed by an orchestra or a modern grand filling in behind. Here Goy switches to a 1910 Pleyel luthéal — a bizarre, half-forgotten contraption with register stops that can turn a piano into something resembling a cimbalom, or a harpsichord, or an out-of-tune music box, depending on which lever gets pulled. When it finally enters after Tur Bonet’s long unaccompanied cadenza — full of scordatura-adjacent slides, harmonics plucked out of thin air, a rhapsodic wildness that never quite tips into indulgence — the effect is genuinely startling. Not tasteful. Not “authentic” in some dutiful museum sense. Actually startling, the way I imagine it must have struck Ravel’s first audiences, half gypsy fantasy and half fairground novelty act. There’s a metallic buzz and jangle to the sound that a modern piano simply cannot replicate, and it turns the piece’s whole rhetoric — already extravagant — into something close to hilarious. I laughed out loud on first listen, which is not a sentence I get to write often about Ravel.

The Sonata for violin and cello closes the program, and it’s the most demanding music here by some distance — dedicated to Debussy’s memory, premiered by Jourdan-Mourhange with cellist Maurice Maréchal in 1922, and built on the principle that the two instruments should circle each other in near-identical registers, trading identities rather than settling into the usual melody-and-bass hierarchy. Marco Testori’s cello has a lean, almost baritonal quality that lets him match Tur Bonet’s timbre astonishingly well in the unison passages of the second movement; you sometimes have to listen hard to tell who’s playing what. Tur Bonet has called this “one of Ravel’s bravest compositions,” and she’s not wrong — the astringent counterpoint of the finale, with its Bartókian bite, still sounds forward-looking a century on.

Does this release displace, say, Kyung-Wha Chung and Radu Lupu’s classic account of the sonata, or Gidon Kremer’s incendiary Tzigane? Not exactly — those remain benchmarks of sheer instrumental polish. But polish was never quite the point of this project. What Tur Bonet, Testori, and Goy offer instead is something closer to time travel: an attempt to hear this music through period ears, with period instruments, warts and all. It mostly succeeds, and where it doesn’t — the Hautrive occasionally sounds thin against the more athletic passages of the sonata — the ambition still commands respect. A genuinely illuminating disc, and required listening for anyone who thought they knew the Tzigane cold.