Uploaded May 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago

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Hello guys! I like to show you this raw recording of me playing the 3rd movement of Maurice Ravel‘s Sonatine. This was recorded in 2020 some months before my final concert of my Master studies. During Quarantine there was actually so much time and calmness to dive into music which I didn’t experience before and after.

I also had interesting experiences with Ravel‘s Sonatine taking part in a Masterclass with Carmen Piazzini held by the Chopin society Darmstadt in November 2019.
In the future I like to make a proper recording of all movements. Thank you for listening!

More impresssionist repertoire:

Claude Debussy: Arabesque No.1: youtu.be/77hQ2DF6KlE
Maurice Ravel: Pavane pour une infant défunte: youtu.be/teyADvSvGWE
Claude Debussy: Doktor Gradus ad Parnassum: youtu.be/VsYRNkO6MAE

Joseph Maurice Ravel (7 March 1875 – 28 December 1937) was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with Impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was internationally regarded as France's greatest living composer.

Born to a music-loving family, Ravel attended France's premier music college, the Paris Conservatoire; he was not well regarded by its conservative establishment, whose biased treatment of him caused a scandal. After leaving the conservatoire, Ravel found his own way as a composer, developing a style of great clarity and incorporating elements of modernism, baroque, neoclassicism and, in his later works, jazz. He liked to experiment with musical form, as in his best-known work, Boléro (1928), in which repetition takes the place of development. Renowned for his abilities in orchestration, Ravel made some orchestral arrangements of other composers' piano music, of which his 1922 version of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition is the best known.

A slow and painstaking worker, Ravel composed fewer pieces than many of his contemporaries. Among his works to enter the repertoire are pieces for piano, chamber music, two piano concertos, ballet music, two operas and eight song cycles; he wrote no symphonies or church music. Many of his works exist in two versions: first, a piano score and later an orchestration. Some of his piano music, such as Gaspard de la nuit (1908), is exceptionally difficult to play, and his complex orchestral works such as Daphnis et Chloé (1912) require skilful balance in performance.

Ravel was among the first composers to recognise the potential of recording to bring their music to a wider public. From the 1920s, despite limited technique as a pianist or conductor, he took part in recordings of several of his works; others were made under his supervision.

#ravel #sonatine