Emile Naoumoff - Ravel: Miroirs, Sonatine & Valses nobles et sentimentales (2020) [Official Digital Download]

×

Emile Naoumoff - Ravel: Miroirs, Sonatine & Valses nobles et sentimentales (2020) [Official Digital Download]

Close

It was in the short span of one decade, between the composition of Jeux d’eau (1901) and the Valses nobles et sentimentales (1911), that Maurice Ravel produced most of his piano solo works, which have since become classics of the piano literature. Many among the representative works of this period are covered in the present recording by Emile Naoumoff.

×

Emile Naoumoff - Ravel: Miroirs, Sonatine & Valses nobles et sentimentales (2020) [Official Digital Download]

Close

Most of them were written by a composer still in his twenties who,
although a consummate master (as the author of Shéhérazade and the String Quartet), was paradoxically still in search of the official recognition represented by the Paris Conservatoire “Prix de Rome”, which (famously) was refused him thrice: it is precisely to this period that belong Pavane pour une infante défunte (1899), Sonatine (1903-05) and the five pieces which form the collection Miroirs (1904-05). Valses nobles et sentimentales corresponds to another phase, during which the composer had added to his catalogue important works such as Histoires naturelles, L’Heure espagnole, Ma Mère
l´Oye and Gaspard de la nuit, and had already become firmly established in the French musical scene, Diaghilev’s commission of Daphnis et Chloé being an example.

The earliest piece selected for this recording dates from 1899, and remains as one of Ravel’s most popular compositions: Pavane pour une infante défunte, dedicated to the Princess Edmond de Polignac, premiered in 1902 by Ravel’s friend, the great Spanish pianist Ricardo Viñes, and which was later orchestrated in 1910. Sonatine in three movements, dedicated to Ida and Cipa Godebski, was composed in 1903-05 and premiered by Paule de Lestan, in 1906, and according to Alfred Cortot, “it offers, in its intentional succinctness, the example of a perfect construction in which all the details are on the exact same scale as its title: themes as well as developments, the general feeling,
and the style of notation”. Miroirs differs from other piano collections (such as Gaspard de la nuit, Valses nobles et sentimentales and the later Tombeau de Couperin) in that it consists of a set of independent and self-sufficient pieces, rather than of a unified polyptych.