Maurice Ravel - composer

Maurice Ravel (b. 7 March 1875 – d. 28 December 1937) was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with Impressionism alongside his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. During the 1920s and 1930s, Ravel was internationally regarded as France’s greatest living composer.

Born into a music-loving family, Ravel attended France’s premier music college, the Paris Conservatoire. He was not well regarded by its conservative establishment, whose biased treatment of him caused a scandal. After leaving the conservatoire, Ravel pursued his own path as a composer, developing a style characterized by great clarity and incorporating elements of modernism, Baroque music, neoclassicism and, in his later works, jazz. He enjoyed experimenting with musical form, as in his best-known work, Boléro (1928), in which repetition takes the place of development. Renowned for his abilities in orchestration, Ravel also made orchestral arrangements of other composers’ piano music, the best known being his 1922 version of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

A slow and painstaking worker, Ravel composed fewer pieces than many of his contemporaries. His works that entered the repertoire include piano music, chamber music, two piano concertos, ballet music, two operas and eight song cycles. He wrote no symphonies or church music. Many of his works exist in two versions: first as a piano score and later as an orchestration. Some of his piano music, such as Gaspard de la nuit (1908), is exceptionally difficult to play, while his complex orchestral works, including Daphnis et Chloé (1912), require skilful balance in performance.

Ravel was among the first composers to recognize the potential of recording to bring music to a wider public. From the 1920s onward, despite his limited abilities as a pianist and conductor, he participated in recordings of several of his works, while others were made under his supervision.