LDV109

17 PHILIPPE BIANCONI You first recorded Ravel’s piano music some thirty years ago. How do you see it now? Philippe Bianconi : It still moves me as much as ever, and at the same time I realise how far my view of this music has progressed. This new recording has made the connection I have always had with Ravel’s works stronger and more personal. I’ve rediscovered my delight in the Ravelian sound-world, but I’ve also come to grips with the darker side of his music. Over time, and during the year I spent preparing for the recording, I realised that I had previously perceived it in a rather unequivocal way: as luminous, diurnal, limpid. That dark, sometimes even tragic side to it doesn’t exist only in the Concerto for the Left Hand or Gaspard de la nuit . I feel that more keenly today. I’m thinking, for instance, of some of the pieces in Miroirs , and of the Sonatine , which at first hearing seems so radiant. The Sonatine is an enclosed world, which embraces a specific feeling akin to solitude, but also moments of overwhelming élan. Its first movement includes a sorrowful episode, and its toccata-like finale, haunted by a certain fury, ends in a kind of liberation with a cry of victory, a frenzy that detonates the whole thing, wrenching it out of the shadows and raising it towards the light. The Sonatine is like a sky traversed by clouds that are dispelled at the end. Similarly, Jeux d’eau , with its glittering high notes, no longer sounds so uniformly luminous to my ears: the work reveals contrasts between sparkling passages and sloughs of depression – listen to those notes in the bass when the opening theme returns! And what can one say of the Menuet from Le Tombeau de Couperin , a movement of serene clarity that conceals, in the Musette at its heart, a darkness, a sense of overwhelming drama?