Ravel: Complete Music For Solo Piano – Perfect for Classical Music Lovers, Piano Students & Concert Performances

Huntley Dent, Fanfare magazineThis reissue of Ravel’s complete piano music originally appeared on ASV, so Eloquence is departing from its usual sources in the Decca, Philips, and DG vaults. Recorded in 1990 in a London church, and featuring excellent sound from a rich-toned piano, the CDs met with a mixed response. A British piano professor at the Royal College of Music was an unlikely proponent of Ravel, but Fergus-Thompson, born in 1952, has recorded Debussy as well as applying his powerful technique—he was a student of John Ogdon and Alexis Weissenberg—to Scriabin and Rachmaninoff. The Gramophone reviewer at the time bent over backwards to find Fergus-Thompson an admirable interpreter of Ravel, in an apparent burst of special pleading.Leslie Gerber was much less accepting—he curtly dismissed Volume 1 in Fanfare16:4, only to be pleasantly surprised by Volume 2 in 17:3. The bone of contention remains the pianist’s freely unorthodox style, which does not conform to how Ravel’s piano music sounds at the hands of French performers or a renowned specialist like Walter Gieseking. The differences begin on the surface. Fergus-Thompson delivers a big sound that is founded on the bass. Gieseking and a modern French virtuoso like Jean-Yves Thibaudet create a glittering sheen built from the treble down. Their touch in pianissimo passages is exquisite; Fergus-Thompson hovers around piano and mezzo-piano.In his phrasing Fergus-Thompson is freely verging on the Romantic, whereas Gieseking sets the norm with objective, precise elegance. Gieseking’s post-war Ravel for EMI takes this style to the edge of brittleness, and his technique, no longer as brilliant as before, doesn’t consistently dazzle. But Fergus-Thompson doesn’t set out to dazzle. In his Valses nobles et sentimentales the dancers almost have two left feet, and although he has the technique for Gaspard de la nuit, it extends just to the notes, not to creating a magical or sinister atmosphere.Eloquence previously released the pianist’s complete Debussy on five CDs and complete Scriabin on four, but I can’t help but feel that Fergus-Thompson is peripheral in the Ravel discography. He definitely plays with a difference, but I imagine few will exclaim Vive la difference! In the expressive vein he is working, Vlado Perlmutter is far superior. If you believe, as many do, that Gieseking’s postwar Ravel isn’t a first choice, there’s a similar lightness from Thibaudet (Decca), but I find him a superficial interpreter. There are a number of other modern choices, however, and I am very enthusiastic about the complete Ravel piano music from Alexander Tharaud in 2003 (Harmonia Mundi). He’s almost as brilliant as Gieseking in his prime when it comes to a glittering surface, but in addition Tharaud finds expressivity in the manner of Perlmutter (who recorded his set in his 70s with diminished technical powers).I find this release an honorable commemoration of an English virtuoso better known for teaching than recording or concertizing. If that’s an unfair characterization, his off-the-beaten-track approach to Ravel is intriguing, and might appeal to other listeners more than it does to me.