Maurice Ravel

Ravel was born in the Basque town of Ciboure in 1875 and worked in Paris and, from 1921, at Le Belvédère in Montfort-l'Amaury. He is often grouped with Debussy as an Impressionist, a label both rejected. His music is known for clarity and classical forms, and it draws on dance forms such as the pavane, the waltz and the bolero, together with Basque, Spanish and, later, jazz influences. He was a slow, perfectionist worker, wrote no symphonies, and was famous as an orchestrator: several works began as piano pieces that he later orchestrated.

Many of the works here follow those lines. Le Tombeau de Couperin (1914 to 1917) is a piano suite in Baroque dance forms, each movement for a friend who died in the First World War, and it is largely light-hearted. Gaspard de la nuit (1908) sets three prose poems by Aloysius Bertrand; Le Gibet is built around a repeated B-flat tolling in the middle of the keyboard, and Scarbo was meant to be harder than Balakirev's Islamey. The Rapsodie espagnole (1907 to 1908) keeps returning to a descending four-note figure, and its Habanera began as a two-piano piece of 1895.

Tzigane (1924) opens with a long unaccompanied violin passage, mostly on the G string, in a Hungarian Gypsy style. Boléro (1928) alternates two 18-bar melodies over a snare-drum rhythm that never stops, passing the tune from instrument to instrument in a steady crescendo from very soft to very loud. The Piano Concerto for the Left Hand (1929 to 1930, for Paul Wittgenstein) opens with a contrabassoon solo and has jazz-influenced rhythms.