We celebrate the 150th birthday of Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) in 2025, and Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho has just recorded the complete piano music of the French master. 2025 also marks a decade since the pianist was awarded first prize in the 2015 Warsaw Chopin Competition. To mark this double anniversary, Cho has been performing single recitals of Ravel’s piano music in chronological order, a wonderful celebration of both the composer and his music. This recording gathers those recitals into one complete package that is a delight to listen to.
Maurice Ravel in 1925
Seong-jin Cho (photo by Christoph Köstlin)
Ravel started attending the Paris Conservatoire in 1889. He won first prize in the piano competition in 1891. He was expelled in 1895 as a piano student for not winning any prizes after 1891 and re-entered in 1897 as a composer. He studied with Gabriel Fauré, who admired him greatly. He was expelled again in 1900 again, for having won no prizes. He attended Fauré’s classes as an auditor, which, as a former student, he was permitted to do. He gave up on the Conservatoire in 1903.
The grand prize at the Conservatoire was the Prix de Rome, awarded to young composers, and Ravel entered the competition five times: in 1900, he was eliminated in the first round; in 1901, he won second prize; In 1902 and 1903, he won nothing; on his last attempt, in 1905, at age 30, he was eliminated in the first round, and a scandal erupted. Even his detractors protested his exclusion. One of the jurors, Charles Lenepveu, had only passed his own students into the final round, and his protests that this was a coincidence were not believed. In the end, the director of the Conservatoire, Théodore Dubois, had to step down and was replaced by Fauré, who was appointed by the government to reorganise the Conservatoire. Ravel still lost, but was such an example that the corrupt system was brought down.
In compensation, Alfred Edwards, owner and editor of the newspaper Le Matin, took Ravel on a seven-week cruise on the Rhine in the summer of 1905.
Ravel’s mode of composition was to create works on the piano and then arrange them for a full orchestra. Both versions were performed and sold and Ravel benefited twice from this working method. Pieces on this recording that might be better known through their orchestral versions include Pavane pour une infante défunte, Une barque sur l’océan and Alborada del gracioso from the Miroirs piano suite, Valses nobles et sentimentales, and Le tombeau de Couperin, among others. Some works, such as Boléro, were written for orchestra then made into piano transcriptions. These are not on this recording.
Maurice Ravel in 1913
Ravel worked slowly and carefully, and his musical output is much smaller than many of his contemporaries. He wrote no symphonies or church music but pieces for piano, chamber music, two piano concertos, ballet music, two operas and eight song cycles.
One of his important contributions to music was his enthusiastic acceptance of recordings and their potential to bring music to a wider audience.
Some of Ravel’s piano music has been called ‘exceptionally difficult to play’, such as Gaspard de la nuit and this complexity can also be found in some of his orchestral music.
On this recording, we follow Ravel from his earliest extant piano works, Sérénade grotesque (1892–1893), through Le Tombeau de Couperin (1914–1917). Over those 25 years, we don’t hear the usual advance from inexperience to accomplishment. The Sérenade has its own authority.
Maurice Ravel: Sérénade grotesque
In a work such as Jeux d’eau from 1901, we hear Ravel’s innovative side as the work is popularly credited as the first example of impressionism in piano music. It evokes all aspects of the playful water: it shimmers and flows, cascading in quick motions, He had the poet Henri de Régnier write a line from his poem “Fête d’eaux” on the manuscript, ‘Dieu fluvial riant de l’eau qui le chatouille’ (River god laughing at the water that tickles him).
When you consider that his first two works still remain in the repertoire (Pavane pour une infante défunte and Jeux d’eau), we can begin to understand why the Conservatoire professors found him ‘”only teachable on his own terms’.
The works on this recording include his Sonatine (1903–1905), Miroirs (1904–1905), Gaspard de la nuit (1908), Valses nobles et sentimentales (1911), and Le tombeau de Couperin (1914–1917). The latter was modeled on a traditional French Baroque suite, but his subjects were his friends who had fallen in the first world war. A tombeau is a memorial, in this case nominally to François Couperin (1668–1733), but this work, in reality, is a thoroughly modern kind of memorial. The movements are based on Baroque forms, but it’s a piece in a purely neo-Classical style. Ravel avoided a sombre sound and produced a work that is more light-hearted and reflective – when criticised for the mood, Ravel responded, ‘The dead are sad enough, in their eternal silence’.
Maurice Ravel: Le tombeau de Couperin – I. Prélude
Some of the works on the recording were written for special occasions, such as the Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn, written in 1909 for the centenary of Haydn’s death. The editor of the Revue musicale mensuelle de la Société Internationale de Musique wrote to Ravel, Claude Debussy, Vincent d’Indy, Paul Dukas, Reynaldo Hahn, and Charles-Marie Widor, giving them a 5-note theme based on Haydn’s name and asking them for pieces.
The start of Ravel’s Menuet in honour of Haydn, with Haydn’s name in notes, 1910 (Gallica: ark:/12148/bpt6k5589273s)
In 1912, the composer Alfred Casella invited Ravel to contribute to an anthology, and he wrote two works in the styles of other composers: a waltz in the style of Borodin, and a paraphrase of an aria from Gounod’s Faust in the style of Chabrier.
The performance by Seong-Jin Cho of Ravel’s music on this recording is authoritative and commanding. Nothing seems too difficult to play and his ability to bring the colour and light that Ravel intended to the music is sometimes breathtaking to listen to. The final movement of Gaspard de la nuit, Scarbo, is considered the ‘Mount Everest of French piano music in regard to its formidable technical demands and diabolic subtext’, yet Cho takes it with a sense of ease that is enviable.
Maurice Ravel: Gaspard de la nuit – III. Scarbo
In its chronological arrangement, the recording enables the listener to walk through time with Ravel – see what he’s interested in, what he finds challenging, and, in the end, see how he remembers his deceased friends, many of whom were important in his own musical development.
Ravel: Complete Piano Music
Seong-Jin Cho
Deutsche Grammophon
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