Maazel’s 20th Century Preference for Ravel

In the CD collection Lorin Maazel: The Complete Warner Edition, conductor Maazel shows decidedly more interest in the nineteenth century than he does in the twentieth. (Some readers may recall that this site devoted an entire article to two symphonies by Anton Bruckner before going on to the other nineteenth-century composers in the collection: Johannes Brahms, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Antonín Dvořák.) Only five CDs account for the twentieth century, and three of them involve Maurice Ravel.

That said, there is much to be gained from listening to the Ravel CD that presents both of the composer’s piano concertos. The pianist is Jean-Philippe Collard, performing with the Orchestre National de France. Each of these concertos has its own rhetoric of sassiness and no shortage of moments that are downright outlandish. Ravel clearly had a sense of humor, and it is most evident in these concertos. To some extent that humor is also evident in at least some of his orchestrations of the movements Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition suite. Ironically, the CD for that suite has an “overture” track devoted to Claude Debussy’s “Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune” (prelude to the afternoon of a faun). Presumably, when that album was first released in 1962, someone, perhaps associated with the Philharmonia Orchestra, decided that Pictures needed an overture!

There is also a second Ravel CD with four familiar tracks. It is framed by “Boléro” at the beginning and “La valse” at the end. These serve as “bookends” for works originally composed for piano. The first of these is the orchestral version of “Pavane pour une infante défunte,” and it is followed by the “Alborada del gracioso” movement from the Miroirs suite.

The only other composer to receive more than one composition in this series is Richard Strauss. Most of his CD accounts for Also sprach Zarathustra. However, the seriousness of that tone poem is followed by “comic relief” with the performance of “Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks.”

The remaining CD accounts for two performances by pianist Sviatoslav Richter, each with a different orchestral ensemble. The CD begins with Béla Bartók’s second piano concerto with Maazel conducting the Orchestre de Paris. He then “crosses the Channel” (so to speak), leading the London Symphony Orchestra in Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 55, his last completed piano concerto.

Sergei Prokofiev (cropped from a family portrait, photographer unknown, public domain)

From a personal point of view, I was particularly glad to have another encounter with Richter. Some readers may recall that I wrote about him a little less than a week ago in my “19th Century (‘beyond’ Bruckner)” article. Bartók and Prokofiev had decidedly different approaches to the keyboard, but each of them had his own way of departing from Johannes Brahms, so to speak. Mind you, Brahms’ Opus 83 concerto was one of my earliest pocket score purchases; but, when I first became a radio announcer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in my freshman year, I quickly gravitated to Bartók for the program of twentieth-century music that I hosted.

Sadly, the Bartók-Prokofiev CD will be Richter’s last appearance in this Maazel collection.

Readers may recall that this collection has not yet been released. That said, Tower Records has created a Web page for it. The preorder release date is this coming November 6.