Spotlight Ravel: Five orchestral works

Karajan performed and recorded more pieces by Ravel than by Debussy, but it both cases he had his favourites while there were others that he conducted rarely or not at all. In concert he concentrated on the “Daphnis et Chloé” suite Nr. 2 (47 times) and the “Boléro” (28 times), the latter often as the culmination. He also interpreted “Rhapsodie Espagnole” (20 times) as second piece of his concerts. Karajan loved mixed programmes with a classical symphony by Haydn or Mozart at the beginning, a modern orchestral “showpiece” by Richard Strauss or Ravel before the interval and a great symphony from the 19^th century repertoire (Beethoven, Brahms, Dvořák, Tchaikovsky) after it. In Karajan’s later years, when his concerts were shorter, he combined the “Pavane pour une infante défunte” with the “Boléro” in the second half, which thus lasted little more than 20 minutes. This was not because he was no longer up to it physically. He strongly believed that modern audiences could not take more than about an hour of music in a concert (opera was a different matter).

“La Valse” with its refined orchestration and its catastrophic final pages looked like an ideal piece to fill out Karajan’s repertoire of fateful music written around World War I (Berg op.6, “Elektra”, Mahler 6, Sibelius 4). But he only conducted it three times in concert at the beginning of his career (when Ravel was still alive!), one of them being his first encounter with the Vienna Philharmonic at a private concert in Salzburg’s “Mirabellgarten” in 1934. The only recording was a precious all-Ravel album in 1971, one of his rare studio sessions with the Orchestre de Paris “improvised out of thin air when a strike of technicians forced him to cancel film sessions in Paris (Richard Osborne)”. It also included two orchestrations of piano works – “Alborada del gracioso” and “Le tombeau de Couperin” – and the “Rhapsodie Espagnole” for the second time after his recording with the Philharmonia in 1953.

“No Karajan record surpasses this for sultry beauty.”
Richard Osborne

 

We’ve prepared playlists with Karajan conducting Ravel. Listen to them here.

—  P.R. Jenkins