Ravel Orchestral Works (CD Review)

by Karl Nehring 

Valses nobles et sentimentales; Ma mère l’Oye (Complete Ballet); Daphnis et Chloé, Suites Nos. 1 and 2; L’Éventail de Jeanne: Fanfare. St. Olaf Choir; Minnesota Orchestra; Stanisław Skrowaczewski, conductor. VOX-NX-3037CD

 

Many classical music lovers of a certain age are no doubt familiar with Vox, a budget label that produced some real gems that provided the music lover on a budget an excellent way to expand their classical LP collections at a reasonable price. I can offer a quick example from my own experience: I’ll never forget a day back in the mid-1970s when I was strolling through a Sears department store one afternoon and came across an aisle display that featured the newly released 4-LP Vox Box of Ravel’s orchestral music featuring Stanislaw Skrowaczewski conducting the Minnesota Orchestra. I was back in college on the G.I. Bill after serving 4½ years in the Army, with a wife, two kids, a pair of Bose 901s, a rapidly expanding passion for classical music, and a tight budget. When I saw that this box was on sale for something like seven bucks – well, that settled it, I just had to have it. It sounded pretty darn good through the 901s (purchased in Germany with my reenlistment bonus) when I got home, and I found the music of Monsieur Ravel to be utterly spellbinding. Even though Vox was a budget label, the sound quality on some of their releases could be excellent (the main drawback was the often-substandard quality of their vinyl pressings), and this Ravel set, which was recorded by Elite Recordings (engineer Marc Aubort and producer Joanna Nickrenz), had beguiling sound. Those performances and recordings still hold up as you can see from reviews of digital releases from the Ravel set, such as a review from our own John Puccio that you can read here, or an article at the PS Audio website that provides some insight into the recording process, which you can find here. 

 

Appearing on the back cover of these new “Vox Audiophile Edition” releases is a highlighted statement affirming that “The recordings of American orchestras produced for VOX by the legendary Elite Recordings team of Marc Aubort and Joanna Nickrenz are considered by audiophiles to be among the very finest sounding orchestral recordings ever made” For this new series of reissues from the Vox catalog, the folks at Naxos have begun to pull some of those  tapes out from the vaults and carefully prepare these CDs for release, the end product of their labors being what they describe as “new192 kHz / 24-bit ultra high definition transcriptions of the original Elite Recordings analogue master tapes.” Yes, those Vox Ravel LPs had sounded more than satisfying back in the day when played through that Army-purchased college playback system and continued to sound just fine as that system got upgraded over next decade. As CDs began to gain in popularity in the 1980s and I began to make the transition from LP to CD, I found CD versions of the Minnesota Ravel recordings, which Vox released in remarkably cheap cardboard packaging. It is heartening to see the care that Naxos is taking with this new series.

 

The one curious decision by the Naxos production team as far as I can see concerns the order of the program; specifically, the decision to close rather than open with the brief (1:55) fanfare from the children’s ballet L’Éventail de Jeanne (“Jean’s Fan”), which premiered in 1929. Ten French composers contributed the music the, including the fanfare by Ravel. Although it is not the fanfare for any of the other compositions included on this disc, it still seems much more fitting for a fanfare to open rather than close a program, n’cest-pas? Other than that, there is nothing about this jam-packed (80+ minutes) release about which to quibble. In our previous Classical Candor posting (Recent Releases No. 72, here), we mentioned another fine Skrowaczewski-led Minnesota performance. The Polish-born Stanisław Skrowaczewski (1923-2017) became Music Director of the orchestra in 1959, a position he held for 19 years. He was then appointed conductor laureate, returning every year to Minnesota to lead his beloved orchestra. In all, his relationship with the orchestra stretched over 56 years. He was instrumental in their getting the acoustically resplendent new concert hall in 1974, the venue in which Elite Recordings was called in to record their complete set of Ravel’s orchestral works for orchestra, of which this new release offers a substantial sampling on one CD.

 

The disc opens with Valses nobles et sentimentales, a beautiful, flowing piece that Ravel said he intended to compose as a series of waltzes following the example of Schubert. The music sweeps the listener along, but with charm rather than the feverish intensity of his other famous orchestral waltz fantasy, La Valse. Next up is what was the highlight of the original Vox Box, the complete score for the ballet Ma mère l’Oye (“Mother Goose”). There is something simply magical about this music, the way the sound of the solo violin can seem to float above the orchestra, the way the orchestra can swoon and sigh. Magic… Then the familiar Daphnis et Chloé, Suites Nos. 1 and 2, derived from Ravel’s self-described “choreographic symphony.” 

After such a glorious experience, to end the program with a fanfare? As Joe. E. Brown said to Jack Lemmon at the end of Some Like It Hot, “Well, nobody’s perfect.” Maybe so, but this release is close.