If you like your Ravel piano concertos focusing on fastidious detail and untrammeled elegance, these 1979 recordings surely will suit your needs. Lorin Maazel balances the composer’s inventive orchestrations like a one-man chamber ensemble. Notice, for instance, the dapper, zestful shaping of the G major Finale’s hair-trigger solo woodwind licks, the unusual clarity of the opening double bass and contrabassoon exchanges at the Left Hand concerto’s outset, and the incisive brass ensemble work later on in the work. Jean-Phillippe Collard’s sparkling, shapely pianism is mostly first-rate. Only his prosaic trills in the G major concerto’s first movement and his dragging of the Left Hand concerto’s big, rhetorical unaccompanied stretches disappoint. For the earthy dynamism under the music’s surface, however, EMI’s back catalog offers François/Cluytens and Ciccolini/Martinon.
Collard stands out in the solo works. He binds the Pavane’s difficult-to-balance linear strands with consummate ease. Ditto his moderately paced, gorgeously proportioned Jeux d’eaux. Michel Beroff joins Collard for an impressively coordinated rendition of the composer’s two-piano La Valse arrangement.
