Yeol Eum Son masterfully captures the ambivalent character of the two Ravel Piano Concertos, almost merging them into one. Under her fingers, an equal, discreet obscurity is revealed as much in one as in the other.

Led by their musical director Anja Bihlmaier, the musicians of the Residentie Orkest The Hague offer the pianist (born in 1986) lyrical phrasing and beautiful nocturnal atmospheres.

For the Korean pianist, Ravel’s Concertos evokes the horrors of the Great War as much as a moment in her country’s history, the wars that shook the European continent at the beginning of the 20th century echoing her nation’s first independence movements.

In the form of a postlude, the four pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach presented here in arrangements for the left hand alone by Paul Wittgenstein, form more than an escape. They constitute, after the horrors of the destruction, the real moment of reparation.

A few months after finishing his famous Boléro, Maurice Ravel set himself a new challenge: to bring together the two instruments that have always been at the heart of his main occupations, the piano and the orchestra. Two commissioners would ultimately help him: Serge Koussevitzky, the head of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and ardent advocate of the music of his time, for whom Ravel would conceive the Concerto in G major, and Paul Wittgenstein, a pianist born in Vienna in 1887 who, since losing his right hand on the front during a Russian offensive on Poland, had worked to develop the repertoire dedicated to the left hand alone.

From the imagination of the French composer would emerge two works, at the same time diametrically opposed and complementary. Luminous, light, with a quasi-chamber music feel, resolutely classically inspired in its three well-defined movements, the Concerto in G major recalls Mozart’s purity, while the Concerto in D major in a single movement seems dark, harsh, implacable, like an echo of the final collapse of La Valse, conceived ten years earlier. The soloist - with his or her left hand alone - must confront Everest, an orchestra almost three times larger than in the other concerto, and almost inhuman technical challenges.

The hymn to life that seems to be the Concerto in G major, a work begun before and completed after the other, is perhaps an illusion; the pain is in reality transfigured, in the evocation of remembrances throughout the sublime Adagio assai, or by the intoxication of hope in the sparkling final Presto.