Maurice Ravel (1875 - 1937)

French, of paternal Swiss and maternal Basque descent, Ravel combined skill in orchestration with meticulous technical command of harmonic resources, writing in an attractive musical idiom that was entirely his own in spite of contemporary comparisons with Debussy, a composer his senior by some 20 years.

Ravel himself was a good pianist. His music for the piano includes compositions in his own nostalgic archaic style, such as the Pavane and the Menuet antique, as well as the more complex textures of pieces such as Jeux d’eau (‘Fountains’), Miroirs and Gaspard de la nuit, with its sinister connotations. The Sonatina is in Ravel’s neoclassical style and Le Tombeau de Couperin is in the form of a Baroque dance suite.