Reinterpreting Ravel’s Piano Music for New Tastes

Until at least the 1960s, the notion of how to perform Maurice Ravel’s piano music was largely determined by two specialists, the lawgivers, so to speak: Walter Gieseking, who purveyed it as a series of pale pastels, and Robert Casadesus, to whom the music was an unmagical business colored various shades of gray.

Today, through recorded dissemination and multiplication, Ravel has become common property, with no clearly discernible “school” of performance.

Among the closest we have to an active Ravel specialist--and not merely someone who performs his music--is Alicia de Larrocha, who has newly recorded the composer’s two piano concertos (RCA 60985).

She plays them impressively, with color and rhythmic subtlety, not forgetting to project the requisite open-heartedness for the schmaltzy slow movement of the G-major Concerto and turning fittingly brooding for the ominous proclamations of the Concerto in D.

There is, however, something missing in both totalities: a feeling of on-the-spot creation, that hint of madness that marked the same artist’s 1970s recorded performances (currently unavailable) on the London label, with Lawrence Foster none too gently conducting a roughneck London Philharmonic.

Leonard Slatkin is Larrocha’s meticulous conductor on RCA, directing a Saint Louis Symphony that plays like a dream, if not the troubled dream suggested by much of this music.

There is more heat and seeming spontaneity when Larrocha is on her own in Ravel’s “Valses nobles et sentimentales” and the “Sonatine,” which round out the RCA program.

We confront a different notion of Ravel from the short-lived German pianist Werner Haas (1931-1976), who studied with Gieseking but went his own way stylistically, in his editions of what was until recently regarded as the composer’s complete output for solo piano. Some additional works, of no great significance, have come to light since these 1960s recordings.

Haas’ interpretations are returned to circulation via Philips’ inexpensive “Duo” series (438 353, 2 CDs), and they remain exceptionally communicative and satisfying--as performances and as examples of pre-digital recording technique at its clarifying best.

The Haas Ravel exposes subtexts of the virtuoso glitter of Liszt, the spikiness of Stravinsky (in the concertos) and the liberating influence of jazz, without ignoring that aloof elegance that marks the composer at his most effective.

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While the Monte Carlo Opera Orchestra is hardly the polished modern-music ensemble Haas’ style might demand in either concerto, it is French, which means you get the appropriate, nowadays-almost-vanished local color: the reedily nasal woodwinds and molto vibrato brass.

Furthermore, they play with heady gusto under the baton of Alceo Galliera, whose work lent dignity to such equivocal expressions as “accompanist” and “house conductor” during a long, largely unsung career.

In the music for piano alone, Haas’ unsentimental, propulsive but never skittish style gives us a “Gaspard de la nuit” of eerie intensity, a strikingly classy “Tombeau de Couperin,” its Baroque formality and 20th-Century tensions given equal due.

Of more specialized interest is a “Gaspard de la nuit” played by Ray Dudley on a pingy, metallic-sounding Erard piano built in 1878 and of the sort Ravel owned and for which he conceived some of the scores that were to be publicly played on newer, cushier-sounding instruments.

Part of a collection (Titanic 209) that also includes works by Debussy, Chopin and Liszt (a notably crisp, racy “Mephisto Waltz”), this “Gaspard de la nuit” is delivered by Dudley with wonderful rhythmic thrust and stylishly enhancing rubato.

The result may not resemble Haas’ reading in terms of sound per se, but the two versions pay similar dividends in textural clarity.