BaL 25.11.23 - Ravel: Le tombeau de Couperin

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

10.30 am
Building a Library: Flora Willson chooses her favourite recording of the piano version of Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin

Ravel composed between Le tombeau de Couperin in 1914 and 1917. It’s in six movements, based on those of a traditional Baroque suite. Each movement is dedicated to the memory of a friend who had died fighting in World War I.

[Pulcinella]

I had assumed that both the piano original (six movements) and orchestral suite (four movements) would be covered.
So nearly all my listening, mentioned recently on the What Classical....thread (Abbabo, Ansermet, Boulez (Sony and DG), Dutoit, Haitink, Martinon, Ozawa), in which I thought Ansermet surprisingly good (despite fears over the woodwind intonation), has been in vain!

[LMcD]

I wonder how short the short list will be.

[Pulcinella]

I wonder how short the short list will be.

I'll try to compile one from the Presto site, but it's currently down.

[Andrew Slater]

10.30 am
Ravel composed between Le tombeau de Couperin in 1914 and 1917.

Do you think the BBC's using dodgy AI to generate its schedule text?

[Pulcinella]

Do you think the BBC's using dodgy AI to generate its schedule text?

That would be tragic enough, but more so is that no-one seems to bother checking what appears on their website.

[Pulcinella]

A quick list of available recordings gleaned (rather unquestioningly) from the Presto site.
Some performers might have made more than one recording.

No distinction of availability (CD/D ) made; that would have taken much longer!

Audrey Abela
Alice Ader
Hinrich Alpers
Yukari Arai
Hakon Austbo
Martin James Bartlett
Cinzia Bartoli
Giovanni Umberto Battel
Jean-Efflam Bavouzet
Kim Bernard
Claude Bessmann
Denise Bidal
Idil Biret
John Browning
Michelangelo Carbonara
Robert Casadesus
Bertrand Chamayou
Joanne Chang
Sean Chen
Stephanie Shih-yu Cheng
Jean-Philippe Collard
Paul Crossley
Larissa Dedova
Francois Dumont
Akiko Ebi
Michael Endres
Philippe Entremont
Gordon Fergus-Thompson
Jacques Fevrier
Homero Francesch
Samson François
Paolo Giacometti
Walter Gieseking
Emil Gilels
Alfonso Gomez
Benjamin Grosvenor
Monique Haas
Werner Haas
Mengjie Han
Angela Hewitt
Reiko Hozu
Won-Sook Hur
Ivo Janssen
David Korevaar
Klara Kormendi
Alexander Krichel
Dejan Lazic
Clément Lefebvre
Julien Libeer
Cecile Licad
Louis Lortie
Heidi Lowy
Nikita Magaloff
Ann Martin-Davis
Dominique Merlet
Marcelle Meyer
Nathalia Milstein
Gwendolyn Mok
Vanessa Benelli Mosell
Roger Muraro
Keigo Mukawa
Jean Frédéric Neuburger
Brenda Lucas Ogdon
Steven Osborne
Cécile Ousset
Javier Perianes
Vlado Perlemuter
Artur Pizarro
Georges Pludermacher
Anne Queffélec
Anne Riegler
Pascal Rogé
Charles Rosen
Jacques Rouvier
Alexander Schimpf
Phyllis Sellick
Hüseyin Sermet
Abbey Simon
Yeol Eum Son
Kathryn Stott
Jean-Philippe Sylvestre
Alexandre Tharaud
Jean-Yves Thibaudet
Francois-Joel Thiollier
Valerie Tryon
Florian Uhlig
Orion Weiss
Alexis Weissenberg

[HighlandDougie]

A favourite piece of music and, although I have several on the above list which I greatly like, Benjamin Grosvenor seems to me to bring something special to this music. The Fugue (second movement - and one of the two not included in the orchestral version) has, in his hands, moved me to tears.

[pastoralguy]

Slightly off topic, but I remember the RSNO playing it years ago. The orchestra was trialling first oboe players and there was a super American chap on that week. The chief conductor at that time was Stephane Denève who loved chuntering away to the audience before the concert began. Away he went, hind legs of donkeys littering the stage whilst the first oboe sat, sweating, before he got the opportunity to play one of the biggest oboe solos. He played extremely well despite the nerve splitting wait…

I played a gig with this chap a few weeks later and told him how impressed I’d been with his performance. He said that Denève’s speechifying got longer at each successive performance until someone had a discreet word.

[richardfinegold]

Slightly off topic, but I remember the RSNO playing it years ago. The orchestra was trialling first oboe players and there was a super American chap on that week. The chief conductor at that time was Stephane Denève who loved chuntering away to the audience before the concert began. Away he went, hind legs of donkeys littering the stage whilst the first oboe sat, sweating, before he got the opportunity to play one of the biggest oboe solos. He played extremely well despite the nerve splitting wait…

I played a gig with this chap a few weeks later and told him how impressed I’d been with his performance. He said that Denève’s speechifying got longer at each successive performance until someone had a discreet word.

I heard Deneve conduct in Philadelphia, before the pandemic. His mouth does runneth over

[Pulcinella]

Slightly off topic, but I remember the RSNO playing it years ago. The orchestra was trialling first oboe players and there was a super American chap on that week. The chief conductor at that time was Stephane Denève who loved chuntering away to the audience before the concert began. Away he went, hind legs of donkeys littering the stage whilst the first oboe sat, sweating, before he got the opportunity to play one of the biggest oboe solos. He played extremely well despite the nerve splitting wait…

I played a gig with this chap a few weeks later and told him how impressed I’d been with his performance. He said that Denève’s speechifying got longer at each successive performance until someone had a discreet word.

Staying off topic, this was the make or break first hurdle to conquer in the orchestral versions I listened to, and I was actually surprised by the OSR/Ansermet recording, since that orchestra was not known for the sweetness of its woodwind.

[CallMePaul]

I much prefer the piano version to the (partial) orchestration - perhaps because Ravel was renowned as an orchestrator no-one has attempted to orchestrate the two missing movemnts even though the work is out of copyright. I have the Rogé version which is fine but would like to hear more recent performances. From the list above, Tharaud appeals but I will listen with interest.

[Pulcinella]

I much prefer the piano version to the (partial) orchestration - perhaps because Ravel was renowned as an orchestrator no-one has attempted to orchestrate the two missing movemnts even though the work is out of copyright. I have the Rogé version which is fine but would like to hear more recent orchestrations. From the list above, Tharaud appeals but I will listen with interest.

Not strictly true.

This is from Wiki:

Several other composers have since created orchestrations of those two movements which Ravel omitted, the Fugue and the Toccata. David Diamond orchestrated the second movement Fugue, while the Hungarian pianist and conductor Zoltán Kocsis produced his own version of both the Fugue and the Toccata. However, here, the Toccata, scored for a very large orchestra, goes far beyond the limits of Ravel's own, small orchestra, and the Fugue is set for winds only. Another instrumentation of Fugue and Toccata by pianist Michael Round was recorded by Vladimir Ashkenazy (Exton, 2003): the score is published (as two separate titles, 'Fugue' and 'Toccata') by Edwin F. Kalmus. Round's version of the Toccata adds percussion, requiring up to five players. Kalmus omitted the percussion parts from the published score so as to exactly match the orchestration of the rest of the suite, but these parts are available separately, directly from the orchestrator. In 2013 the British composer Kenneth Hesketh orchestrated the Fugue and Toccata for the exact orchestration of the original four-movement orchestral suite. The first performance was given by the Goettingen Symphony Orchestra conducted by Christoph-Mathias Mueller. The scores are available from Schott Music, London.

[Barbirollians]

Flora Willson - switch off time.

[Alison]

My first version was Louis Lortie, borrowed from the local library, and it remains a favourite. Ben Grosvenor would make an excellent library choice.