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03/09/2025
“Ravel: The Complete Solo Piano Works”
Maurice Ravel: Serenade grotesque, M.5 – Menuet antique, M.7 – Pavane pour une infante défunte, M.19 – Jeux d’eau, M.30 – Sonatine, M.40 – Miroirs, M.43 – Gaspard de la nuit, M.55 – Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn, M.58 – Valses nobles et sentimentales, M.61 – Prélude, M.65 – A la manière de Borodine et Chabrier, M.63 – Le Tombeau de Couperin, M.68
Seong-Jin Cho (piano)
Recording: Siemens-Villa, Berlin, Germany (September 2024) – 131’29
Deutsche Grammophon 486-6184 (Distributed by Universal Music) – Booklet in English and French
South Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho took home the 1st prize at the 2015 Warsaw Chopin Competition. What he brings in his technical and interpretive artistry at the keyboard continues to impress ten years later in the concert hall that’s stunning in his latest recording of Maurice Ravel’s solo piano works in commemoration of the composer’s 150th birthday.
Cho’s understanding of the subtlest intricacies and mystique of Ravel’s music is captured in these recordings which Cho is also performing in live concerts. But if you can’t catch him, this Deutsche Grammophon studio recording is more than the next best thing. Cho in top form in these sessions.
The collection opens with Ravel’s droll Sérénade grotesque, followed by the wistful Menuet antique with its quiet echoes of the baroque in dialogue with protomodern counterpoint.
Those appetizers get us ready for Ravel’s ethereal atmospherics in the Pavane pour une infante défunte with its intimacy and hypnotic mystery, and it is as transporting as ever in Cho’s hands. It’s interconnected by chambers of Ravel’s musical impressionism. This is then followed by the journeying vistas of the Jeux d’eau and the quixotic radiance of the three miniatures of the Sonatine.
Cho leans into the interior dimensions of the five movement Miroirs with its ideas so singular, that they’ll still stop one in one’s musical tracks. Here and throughout these recordings, Cho articulates Ravel’s prismatic musicality, and he lets it breathe so naturally.
The second disc opens with Cho’s reading of Ravel’s tribute to Aloysius Bertrand’s poems, Gaspard de la nuit, that were published posthumously in 1842. The crystalized stream of consciousness is realized on piano with Cho achieving such radiance, starting with the opening movement (“Ondine”) and its cascade of notes. Free of rhythmic tension, yet abound with a panorama of Ravellian watercolors, the proto‑minimalist work gives way to dense pianissimo. This is followed by the somber interiors of “Le Gibet” (Très lent), segued into the turbulent frenzy of the “Scarbo” (Modéré) movement. Cho navigates the density and its sonorous tonal depths. Additionally, Cho’s dexterous control delivers the work’s beasty dynamics that’s kept other pianists away. His triumphal performance, captured here, is up there with legendary performances by Martha Argerich and Samson François.
The Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn pays homage to the centenary observance of Ravel’s death. A century before Ravel, both composers experimented during transitional musical eras – Haydn with his baroque and classical structures and Ravel with his romantic and post‑modern bends. Ravel was inspired by the durability of the minuet and Haydn by his personal letters.
Valses nobles et sentimentales is a mosaic of Ravel’s compositional fusion, interfacing the transitional eras of neoclassicism and proto modernist, as essayed in his 12 miniatures. The most famous passage comes from the universally recognized classic, “Assez lent, avec une expression intense”. Here, the piano interlude fills out this recording with a classical, dancy charm and even a proto‑jazz improv feel.
The most intriguing, the waltzy A la manière de Borodine, followed by the ethereal miniature A la manière de Chabrier (a paraphrase on an aria by Gounod), master the Francophile lyricism of both composers.
To say Cho gives a mature performance of Ravel is an understatement. His playing is never rote, there is a real-time agency to his playing at the same time maintaining stellar technical artistry. On these tracks, Cho is so in the moment with this familiar repertoire, it is also a stellar reminder of Ravel’s fusions of classical, jazz and art vernacular to the piano repertoire.
There is a brief stroll in the sound cloud of the A la manière de Borodine interlude before the incandescent musical garden of Le Tombeau de Couperin, styled as a French baroque suite (after Couperin) but reconceived in memoriam to friends lost on the battlefields of World War I in an assortment of six short movements aligned to classical structure and dance idioms: ”Prélude”, “Fugue”, “Forlane”, “Rigaudon”, “Menuet” and “Toccata”. Particularly moving is Cho’s performance of the “Forlane“, à la mémoire du lieutenant Gabriel Deluc, the longest movement and one of Ravel’s most famous works. Here, Cho delivers a soulful, clarion performance.
There is an intimacy that transfers in these recordings that makes one feel like one is in the room with the pianist. Credit not only Cho’s performance but Emil Berliner Studios for creating that environment and engineers, Rainer Maillard and Juan Moreno. Without a doubt, this is one of the classical recordings of the year.
Lewis J. Whittington
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