(++++) SPLENDORS AND TRIFLES

Ravel: Complete Works for Solo Piano. Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, piano. Chandos. $20.99 (2 CDs).

     Maurice Ravel did not write a great deal of solo-piano music, but that is scarcely a surprise, since he did not write a great deal of music, period: so meticulous and self-critical was Ravel that he methodically worked through nuance after nuance of pretty much every piece, thinking not only of what he wanted to express but also of how he wanted performers to express it – the sheer number of tempo indications within his music bears testimony to the extent to which he sought tight control over the way his works would be presented to audiences. This was especially important for his solo-piano music, since Ravel himself was only a passable pianist, and a great many of his piano pieces were beyond his own capabilities – as if he could hear entirely new ways of extending the piano’s expressiveness but could explain them neither verbally nor through performance.

     It takes a pianist with as much skill and empathy for Ravel as Jean-Efflam Bavouzet possesses to cope with the technical demands of this music while fully exploring its expressiveness and leaving behind, by and large, the impressions that listeners are likely to have of these works in their orchestral form – for Ravel orchestrated some three-quarters of these pieces, and most are far better known in orchestral guise. Then there is the opposite case of La Valse (1919-1920), which originated as an orchestral piece but which Ravel subsequently arranged for solo piano (and also for two pianos). It can be difficult to unwind the intertwining of orchestral-version memories with the solo-piano scores, and a sensitive performer – Bavouzet is certainly one such – does have to think carefully about how to do so. Such thinking is pervasive in this new two-CD Chandos release: in the case of the aforementioned La Valse, for example, Bavouzet opts to use the orchestral version as his touchstone, resulting in slight but noticeable differences between his reading and those of pianists who simply accept and follow Ravel’s piano reduction.

     “Reduction” is not the right word, though, any more than “expansion” would be accurate in describing the transformation of the solo-piano pieces to orchestral ones. The colors, rhythms, expressions and emotions that Ravel sought to evoke are equally present in the piano pieces and in the orchestral ones, no matter what direction the instrumental adaptation takes. And it is those elements that Bavouzet elicits and explores with care and sensitivity throughout this release.

     In addition to La Valse, the pieces heard here are Sérénade grotesque (1892-93), Menuet antique (1895), Pavane pour une infante défunte (1899), Jeux d’eau (1901), Sonatine (1903-05), Menuet in C-sharp minor (1904), Miroirs (1904-05), Gaspard de la nuit (1908), Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn (1909), Valses nobles et sentimentales (1911), À la manière de…Borodine and À la manière de…Emmanuel Chabrier (1912-13), Prélude (1913), and Le Tombeau de Couperin (1914-17). Fifteen works in all, including a single occasional piece (the Haydn menuet, marking the centenary of the composer’s death and based on a rather awkward theme created by displacing letters of “Haydn” onto notes found by cycling through the alphabet); several pieces in the one-to-two-minute range (the Borodin and Chabrier tributes, 1904 menuet and 1913 prélude); one work showcasing Ravel’s skill in rather staid forms (Sonatine, especially its first two movements); and a number of difficult-to-describe, highly individualistic pieces that test a pianist’s thought processes as much as his technical mettle.

     It is worth the mental, or rather aural, effort to hear the Ravel piano works that are better known in orchestral form in their solo-piano versions, because the coloristic effects evoked through the piano differ considerably from those in the orchestral pieces, usually through greater subtlety – or, at least, subtlety of a different sort. Bavouzet is well-attuned to this, managing to pay close attention to those extensive and sometimes frustratingly nitpicky tempo-change indications while preserving the overall shape and flow of the individual pieces. The early three-and-a-half-minute Sérénade grotesque, for example, calls for no fewer than 20 tempo changes; the six-minute Pavane pour une infante défunte includes 17; the four-minute conclusion of Sonatine calls for 14; and Alborada del gracioso, which lasts six-and-a-half minutes, calls for 22, mostly through repeated sequences of premier movement – plus lent. Making sense of the sensibilities that Ravel sought to evoke through these painstakingly explicit notations is no simple task. And doing so while remaining sensitive to certain fascinating recurrences of focus in these works is harder still – yet Bavouzet, to cite just one example, is clearly aware of the extent to which Ravel is concerned with differing keyboard depictions of water, of course in Jeux d’eau and also, in distinct and equally impressive ways, in Une barque sur l’océan from Miroirs and in Ondine from Gaspard de la nuit.

     Throughout all these pieces, from the highly significant ones to those that are comparatively trivial, Bavouzet is at pains to bring clarity of expression and, thus, clarity of communication to music that the extremely detail-oriented Ravel constructed with enormous care. Nothing in these solo-piano works is taken lightly by Bavouzet – that is, he plays with appropriate lightness when that is called for, but he is at pains to reproduce the music with as much attentive precision as the composer brought to bear when meticulously constructing it. The result is a first-rate exploration of a body of work that, although comparatively small, was remarkably influential – and that remains, almost without exception, in the forefront of the repertoire of pianists who, like Bavouzet, seek thoroughly to explore their instrument’s technical, expressive and communicative capabilities.