CCMusic.com

By spreading a five-day festival dedicated to the music of Maurice Ravel across the French capital in March 2025, the Orchestre National de France was celebrating both the 150th anniversary of French composer's birth and it's own captivating history. Whoever the orchestra's Director might be, whatever changes and evolutions have taken place involving musicians, instruments, or anything else, Ravel's music remains, like Debussy's, absolutely central to it's repertoire, and has been ever since it's founding, in January 1934, by Jean Mistler, the then Minister of Post, Telegraphs and Telephones, and Desire-emile Inghelbrecht (1880-1965), the renowned composer and conductor.

The nearly three hours of music in this lovingly illustrated naïve boxed set offer a vast compendium of the French composer's orchestral works, missing only the Menuet antique, the Valses nobles et sentimentales and the Sheherazade overture. Le Tombeau de Couperin, given here in a version that respects the order of the original piano suite and also supplemented by David Molard Soriano's two unpublished, arresting orchestrations, and the complete ballet score of Daphnis et Chloe, both work all their subtle yet utterly intoxicating magic. Surely it is impossible not to marvel at this vividly told account of Daphnis et Chloe, at the natural, filigree balance of the ensemble in, for instance, the Introduction et Danse religieuse and the introduction to Pantomime, at those curvaceous phrases in Danse lente et mysterieuse des Nymphes and Lever du jour, or at the rhythm, rigidly maintained without the least hint of aggression in an unforgettable Danse suppliante de Chloe and the final Bacchanale.

The Orchestre National and it's former Directors Inghelbrecht, Desormière, up until Martinon at the beginning of the 1970s, created a particular style for Ravel, ethereal, elastic, intelligently balanced, the harmonies always radiant. From the very first concert of this new Ravelian spring, which took place on 28 February 2025 in Paris's Philharmonie, the current Director of the orchestra, the Romanian Cristian Macelaru, resurrected this spirit and sustained it until the sublime apotheosis of Ma Mère l'Oye, the final piece of the final concert, on 13 March. From Jardin feerique thus emerged subtle yet raw, honest emotions, the very essence of the magic that is Ravel.

08 JULY 2025