Ravishing beauty

For a composer who gave so much delight to so many, Ravel occupies a peculiar position in 20th-century music. Stravinsky’s famous description, ‘the most perfect of Swiss clockmakers’, still brings a chortle of recognition, though it might be better to think of him as a jeweller. In the words of one critic, writing in 1906, his music conceals tenderness ‘beneath a surface of flashing, kaleidoscopic precious stones’. Either way, he has probably been patronised by kind words more than any other great composer.

Some listeners, it is clear, never forgave him for not being Debussy. Even the famous piano concerto, premiered in 1932, five years before his death, was damned by Constant Lambert as being ‘in painfully good taste throughout’. Yet to hear that work now, when it is part of the standard repertoire, is to hear the clear voice of a master craftsman; one, admittedly, whose romantic leanings were mediated through a classical personality, but there is nothing unusual about that.