In Bertrand Chamayou’s words, Ravel Fragments is “a personal contribution to the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of a composer who has been with me constantly since I was a child”. An album of solo piano music, it ranges from Ravel’s own transcriptions of La Valse and extracts from Daphnis et Chloé – both, of course, spectacular orchestral works – to Chamayou’s own transcriptions of vocal works by the composer, and to pieces that pay tribute to Ravel. Five of these are by composers of the past – Arthur Honegger, Joaquín Nin, Alexandre Tansman, Xavier Montsalvatge and Ricardo Viñes (the pianist who championed the music of Ravel, Debussy and other major figures in the early 20th century), and three by composers of our own time – Betsy Jolas, Salvatore Sciarrino and Frédéric Durieux.

Maurice Ravel was born in 1875 in Ciboure on the Atlantic coast of southern France, close to the Spanish border. In 2020 the Festival Ravel was established in the neighbouring town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz and Bertrand Chamayou is its artistic director. One of his first recordings for Erato was a 2-CD set of Ravel’s complete works for solo piano. At the time he stated that “My style of playing and the way I imagine sound can be largely attributed to Ravel.” The collection was welcomed in glowing terms by Gramophone: “Revelatory performances of breathtaking beauty and incomparable power … Everything flows with the inevitability of speech, precisely articulated, direct and unmistakably sincere … No one who loves French music or exquisite piano-playing will want to miss it.”

That collection did not include the transcriptions of La Valse and Daphnis et Chloé. Chamayou describes Ravel as a composer whose “extreme refinement borders on perfection”, but he considers the composer’s extremely demanding solo version of La Valse (as opposed to the better known version for two pianos) as somehow “deliberately incomplete … as if Ravel were saying to the pianist, ‘See how you manage with this.’” Having taken up that challenge, Chamayou was inspired to assemble Ravel Fragments.

“Each of these pieces evokes Ravel,” he says, “whether in the Hispanic accents of Nin’s Mensaje a Ravel, the enigmatic tenderness of Montsalvatge’s Elegía a Maurice Ravel, the luminous neo-Classicism of Honegger, or the haunting bells of Alexandre Tansman.” Ravel’s piano suite Gaspard de la Nuit informs all three contemporary works, with a reference to the death knell of Le Gibet in Frédéric Durieux’s unnerving Pour tous ceux qui tombent, and through various motifs in Signets by Betsy Jolas. Meanwhile, Sciarrino’s De la Nuit, with its fragments of Ondine and Scarbo, “plays with our memory, creating an hallucinatory impression.” Two-thirds of the way through the programme, Menuet spectral by Ricardo Viñes “offers a brief episode of touching and evocative romanticism”.