Joint Venture Percussion Duo - Ravel:Dances Fairy Tales

Rachel Xi Zhang and Laurent Warnier, the two musicians forming Joint Venture Percussion Duo, met while they were still students at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam. Sharing a love for the music by Maurice Ravel and regretting that the composer never wrote for percussion instruments, they decided to make an arrangement of the Pr�lude from his last work for solo piano, Le Tombeau de Couperin. It proved an exhilarating experience as well as a fruitful exercise, bringing the duo closer together as the players aimed at creating a single, inseparable sound in certain passages, and in others producing a rainbow of timbres, inspired by Ravel's own shimmering orchestral scores. Arrangements of the entire work followed, with the prelude and a toccata framing a series of stylized dances: the Forlane with its dotted rhythms and piquant dissonances, the robust, bucolic Rigaudon and the Minuet, as well as a three-part fugue. The duo went on to arrange Ravel's fairy tales in Ma m�re l'Oye, originally written for piano four hands but later expanded into a ballet score orchestrated by the composer himself. Joint Venture Percussion Duo closes their first CD with their arrangement of what has become one of Ravel's best-known compositions, the nobly melancholic Pavane pour une infante d�funte.