Maurice Ravel Composer

The Frenchman (1875-1937), who fell in love with jazz and kept his childhood toys, was a master of orchestral colour. Christopher Breunig suggests the best recordings.

- Christopher Breunig

Boléro unravelled.’ That was the headline in a hi-fi News advertisement placed in the BBC’s Proms Guide shortly after I joined as Music Editor – hoping to attract new subscribers via ‘& Record Review’.

Ravel’s Boléro for large orchestra (1928) would become the composer’s most popular piece – he made his own Polydor recording in 1930, two days after attending Paris sessions with Piero Coppola for the premiere 78s by The Gramophone Company. And he fell out with Toscanini a few months later, over a much faster tempo imposed by the Italian. The composer Florent Schmidt thought Boléro was ‘the sole mistake in the career of the artist the least disposed to error’. The royalties accrued are estimated at €50 million since 1960 and the score is no longer in copyright.

‘Le Belvédère’, Ravel’s former house in Montfort-l’Amaury (40km from Paris) where the piece was written, became a museum and was in the news twice in February, when the mayor abruptly closed it down for an indefinite period and, as pianist Martha Argerich and Charles Dutoit were visiting, police were called as they had apparently attempted to take inside photographs!

One of Argerich’s calling cards is the jazzy Concerto in G, which she had first recorded in Lausanne in 1959, with Dutoit (later her husband) accompanying. Two years after her success at the 1965 Warsaw Competition she made her first, celebrated, DG version with Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic [479 4883], and when he was principal conductor with the LSO, a more thoughtful and orchestrally idiomatic CD followed [see boxout].