Maurice Ravel held Spain in adoring fascination. The French composer was born in Ciboure, a small seaside resort on the Basque coast within touching distance of the border separating France from its southerly neighbour. Did that shape the composer’s love for the culture, feel and sound of Spain? The nation certainly left its mark, with a whole string of works in all genres bearing its imprint.

So it seems only appropriate that one of Spain’s most distinguished orchestras, under its French Music Director, should return the favour. Over a 30-month period, the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra (OBC) will release recordings of Ravel’s complete orchestral works – with special extras included – the first made using the editorial revisions of the new Ravel Edition.

The Barcelona Symphony Orchestra is particularly buoyed to be undertaking the task under its own Music Director, Ludovic Morlot – a specialist in the French repertoire who brings particular cultural qualities and fastidious care to his interpretations of Ravel’s music. Together with producer Mike George and sound engineer Stephen Rinker – associated with the BBC and Chandos Records – Morlot and his orchestra will present performances of Ravel’s works characterized by precision and clarity, careful calibration of orchestral colour, transparency and balance in both sound and expression. Particularly important qualities, you might say, for a composer attracted to clean melodic contours, distinct rhythms and firm structures but who almost always delivered magic on top, courtesy of his unparalleled symphonic ear.

Ludovic Morlot (photo: Lisa Marie Mazzucco)

Ravel and his generation witnessed upheavals both musical and human: the emergence of jazz and the carnage of the First World War. Nostalgia colours much of Ravel’s music but the composer was just as excited by the musical possibilities of the new world order, from the freedom to write scrunching, dissonant harmonies to the exotic syncopations of jazz.

Volume 1 of Morlot and the OBC’s complete Ravel series, released in April 2024, focused on music with a sense of innocence yet delicately crafted. Ravel created the two-pianist piece Ma mere l’Oye (‘Mother Goose’) for the children of his friends, the Godebskis. It consisted of five piano miniatures based on the classic fairytales the composer used to read to them. It was only a matter of time before Ravel, who was consistently lured into orchestrating piano pieces by the colouristic possibilities of the symphony orchestra, reimagined the pieces for orchestra.

Shortly before starting work on Ma mere l’Oye, Ravel orchestrated another piano work – his 1899 Pavane pour une infante défunte, in which a simple melody is born across the rhythmic underlay of an old aristocratic dance. We sense the profundity of lost youth in that work just as in Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin, the composer’s commemoration of friends lost in the violence of the First World War, which also started life as a piano piece. Ravel’s poignant, thrifty, but ripe themes channel the spirit of the French baroque. Both works compelte the programme for the first disc in the series, for which Gramophone’s review praised Morlot’s ability to balance the music’s textures – all important in these pieces.  

Volume 2, released January 31, transports us to more exotic climes. Mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron is the soloist who will seduce listeners into the sultry world of Scheherazade, a score comprising three evocative songs of sublime beauty sitting somewhere between Rimsky-Korsakov and Debussy in influence and atmosphere. Barron is also the soloist in Ravel’s setting of verse by his favourite French poet, Mallarmé. The composer’s 3 Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé constitute a brief jewel of visionary sonorous inspiration and one of his most atmospheric creations.   

The third vocal piece on this second volume is a real rarity, and one of the lesser-known Ravel works shaped by Spain. In 1932, the filmmaker Georg Pabst was at work on a film telling of the Don Quixote story starring Fyodor Chaliapin. Ravel was commissioned to write three songs for Chaliapin: one heroic, one comic and a serenade to start, but he missed the deadline.

The songs were eventually completed in 1933 and first performed in the composer’s own orchestral version the following year. They show Ravel’s dramatic skill in their combination of swagger and vulnerability. The composer chose a distinctive dance rhythm to carry each song, including a ‘quajira’ to start – a Spanish dance alternating bars of six quavers and three crotchets, here introducing the Don. Baritone Alexandre Duhamel is the soloist on the recording from Barcelona.

Volume 2 is completed by orchestra-only works, including the brief Fanfare Ravel wrote in 1927 for the collaborative ballet score L'éventail de Jeanne and the composer’s orchestration of his own Menuet antique for piano. It concludes with a work that also formed a beginning. Ravel’s fascination with the waltz – a three-step dance associated with the Austrian capital Vienna – first bore fruit with a series of elegant dances written in 1911, his Valses nobles et sentimentales.

These short pieces originally inspired by two old sets of piano music by Franz Schubert contain some of Ravel’s most lucid and deliciously coloured orchestrations, themselves supporting the composer’s gentle dissonances and veiled sensuality. Claude Debussy, on hearing the piece, commented: ‘this is the most subtle ear that can ever have existed’. When Ravel came to write his next waltz-based work in 1919, Vienna and the world had changed beyond recognition. But that’s another story – and a future volume …