Francois - RAVEL: Piano Works, Vol. 2

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) Piano Works, Vol. 2Valses nobles et sentimentales Gaspard de la nuit (Trois po?�mes pour piano d'apr?�s Aloysius Bertrand)Le Tombeau de CouperinLa valse From his father, a Swiss engineer, Ravel inherited a delight in precision and incidentally in mechanical toys, while from his Basque mother he acquired a familiarity with something of Spanish culture. Born in the village of Ciboure in the Basque region of France in 1875, he spent his childhood and adolescence in Paris, starting piano lessons at the age of seven and from the age of fourteen studying piano in the preparatory piano class of the Conservatoire. He left the Conservatoire in 1895, after failing to win the necessary prizes, but resumed studies there three years later under Gabriel Faure. His repeated failure to win the Prix de Rome, even when well established as a composer, disqualified in his fifth attempt in 1905, resulted in a scandal that led to changes in that august institution, of which Faure then became director.Ravel's career continued successfully in the years before 1914 with a series of works of originality, including important additions to the piano repertoire, to the repertoire of French song and, with commissions from Diaghilev, to ballet. During the war he enlisted in 1915 as a driver and the war years left relatively little time and will for composition, particularly with the death of his mother in 1917. By 1920, however, he had begun to recover his spirits and resumed work, with a series of compositions, including an orchestration of La valse, rejected by Diaghilev, causing a rupture in their relations, and a number of engagements as a pianist and conductor in concerts of his own works at home and abroad. All this was brought to an end by his protracted final illness, attributed to a taxi accident in 1932, which led to his eventual death in 1937.The Valses nobles et sentimentales were avowedly written in imitation of Schubert, with the seventh waltz, according to Ravel, the most characteristic. Completed in 1911, the waltzes were performed at a concert of the Societe Musicale Independante by Louis Aubert, to whom they are dedicated, but without any attribution in the programme, the audience being left to show its discrimination by guessing which composers had contributed to the recital. The waltzes were variously attributed to Satie, Kodaly or Ravel, although some suspected a hoax and refused to take the work seriously. At the head of the score is a quotation from Henri de Regnier, from his novel Les rencontres de Monsieur de Breot: 'le plaisir delicieux et toujours nouveau d'une occupation inutile' (the delightful and always novel pleasure of a useless occupation). The work was orchestrated in 1912 as a ballet, Adela?�de, ou le langage des fleurs, for the Russian dancer Natasha Trouhanova and was staged in April that year at the The?�tre du Ch?�telet. The first waltz is cynic