JEAN-EFFLAM BAVOUZET

From the young Ravel who, at just eighteen years of age, showed with his Sérénade Grotesque that he had perfectly assimilated all the influences of Emmanuel Chabrier’s generation, to La Valse, where the equally present whimsy mingles here with the multiplication of virtuoso and coloristic effects, this first concert presents pieces in which Ravel combines dance movements and impressionistic scenes of life. Cultivating the ductility of the French sound, in the tradition of Samson François or André Cluytens, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet stylishly sketches out the almost grating dissonances of the Menuet Antique, whose form anticipates the Sonatine, and all the way to the Tombeau de Couperin, performed in the second concert. The famous Pavane pour une infante défunte is recontextualized here: Ravel dedicated it to a fictional character, wishing to anchor it in a dreamy, almost fantastical dimension. Reality and fiction, past and present, nostalgia and muted sneer: these dualities collide at the heart of the Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, whose critical charge Jean-Efflam Bavouzet reassesses. As for the Miroirs, a veritable aesthetic laboratory, they also bear the mark of Baudelairean spleen, as in ‘Oiseaux Tristes’, and complete the demonstration of the extent of the Ravels unconscious, which one hundred and fifty years later still possesses its evocative power intact.