Konstantinos Destounis has made a speciality of Ravel’s piano works, playing them in concert on many occasions including a two-night survey of the whole solo-piano output, at the conservatoire in Athens last November. He made this recording around the same time, and captures the sense of music on the wing, still wet on the page from the pen of its fastidious creator.

Born in Athens in 1991, Destounis studied in Thessaloniki and at the Mozarteum in Salzburg before taking his Doctorate at the Royal College of Music in London. Springboard to his performing career has been winning many international piano competitions, most notably the Grand Prix Maria Callas in Athens, the Southern Highlands in Canberra and the Bremen European Piano Competition. On this album, he reveals himself to be a compelling interpreter of music which still sets a benchmark among pianists for technical finesse and musicianship. For Ravel, as for Beethoven and Stravinsky, the craft of composition was an essentially pianistic endeavour. While his image has become fixed in popular reception by masterpieces of orchestral colour such as Boléro, La Valse and Daphnis et Chloé, the composer regarded the processes of composition and orchestration as separate. He remarked to his student Vaughan Williams that ‘without a piano one cannot invent new harmonies’.

Ravel paid tribute to his teacher Gabriel Fauré as ‘the origin of whatever pianistic innovation my works may be thought to contain’. All the same, the pianistic influence of Saint-Saëns makes its presence felt too, and Chabrier in the early pieces. Perhaps Ravel becomes more himself in each successive piece, from the Sérénade grotesque of 1892-93 through to Le Tombeau de Couperin of 1914-17, but the process is one of refinement rather than radical transformation, taking in the darkly disturbing imagery of Gaspard de la nuit, which rapidly assumed totemic significance within the modern piano literature.