London revels this summer in Ravel. Paris can’t and won’t

Here’s the Friday review by our resident critic Alastair Macaulay:

by Alastair Macaulay

On Wednesday 11 at the Festival Hall, the Philharmonia Orchestra presented a quadruple bill that should have been all Rs: its resident maestro Santtu Rouvali conducting Rachmaninov (piano concerto no 3), Respighi (“Pines of Rome”), and two by Ravel (“Alborada del Gracioso”). In the event, Rouvali had to cancel at short notice; he was replaced, effectively, by the Mexican conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto. All four scores were in spruce, lucid shape (Nikolai Lugansky was the sensational soloist in the piano concerto, covering a spectrum of moods, with heavenly strokes of poetry in the second movement). And two of them reminded us that 2025 is the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Maurice Ravel.

Ravel’s music returns to repertory frequently enough for there to be no need of anniversary events. In 1975, however, the choreographer George Balanchine celebrated the centenary of Ravel’s birth by presenting the Ravel Festival of New York City Ballet. This was a surprise. Yes, Balanchine had presented Stravinsky Festivals in 1937 and 1972, but his attachment to Stravinsky had been well known from many creations over the decades, whereas (although he had staged the 1925 premiere of “Les Enfants et les sortilèges”) his only Ravel ballet that had been a regular part of his New York City Ballet repertory had been “La Valse” (an audacious yoking of “Valses nobles et sentimentales” to the “Valse” itself with an intensely dramatic scenario – dance, death, love, jewellery, a mirror – far from the one envisaged by Ravel). Now, however, for his 1975 festival, Balanchine made a ballerina solo to “Pavane pour une infante défunte”, a pas de deux to “Sonatine”, a brief ballerina concerto to “Tzigane”, and – among others – an exquisite ensemble for eight young couples to “Le Tombeau de Couperin”. (Another of his 1975 Ravel creations, “Gaspard de la Nuit” surfaced on film in 2024, showing the daring of his theatrical imagination.) For the 1975 festival, he also invited other choreographers to use other Ravel scores: Jerome Robbins made “In G Major” to the piano concerto of that key, and “Mother Goose Suite” to “Ma Mère l’Oye.”

To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of that 1975 festival, New York City Ballet this May the company presented a marvellous Ravel quintuple bill of “In G Major”, “Pavane”, “Tzigane” (now for politic reasons re-named “Errante”), “Ballade” and “La Valse”. These Ravel ballets are as singular as their scores, but an evening of good Ravel ballets does wonders for eye and ear – highly distinctive soundworlds, wonderfully lucid metres, and qualities of imaginative fantasy even for the gentlest composition. Balanchine’s “Pavane for a dead infanta” is a pure-dance solo, but the ballerina’s use of a single length of white fabric becomes, by turns, a canopy, a shroud, a pillow; his “Errante” (“Tzigane” as was) is an array – both intense and jocose – of what used to be called “gypsy” ideas (rule-breaking wildness, fortune-telling, seduction); “Sonatine” is an entirely harmonious pas de deux whose charm lies largely in its way of showing that its woman and its man have keenly separate existences (most marvellously in one exit when they have hands joined above their heads but are facing in opposite directions). Robbins’s “In G Major”, an ensemble with a lead couple, is all sophisticated-leisure blitheness; the Balanchine “Valse” is a Romantically Gothic tale of a ballroom as supernaturally charged as “Macbeth”. Though this 2025 programme omitted Balanchine’s “Le Tombeau de Couperin” (a ballet that can at first seem bland but that becomes an exquisite evocation of an eternally youthful Lost Generation), that has been revived in recent seasons.

Let’s not be so silly as to think that today’s Royal Ballet at Covent Garden, directed for thirteen years now by Kevin O’Hare, is seriously interested in music beyond having it acceptably played by its admirable orchestra. Still, there of us with memories can’t help configuring the Ravel programmes that might be and/or that once were at Covent Garden. Ravel’s “Daphnis and Chloë” is usually a very long score without Ashton’s 1951 choreography, which explains and releases many of the music’s colours, rhythms, and details. (One of its marvels is that it makes the whole ballet company dance to a 5/4 tempo in its finale.) For many people, Chloë was the greatest role of ballerina Margot Fonteyn; a live closeup film of her dancing Chloë’s flute solo may well be the most poetically enthralling record of her dancing. Many stagings of “La Valse” (Balanchine’s included) had been seen in Europe by 1958, when Ashton’s version (a marvel of color in André Levasseur’s costumes) had its premiere at La Scala. The composer Francis Poulenc told Ashton then that his was the closest to Ravel’s conception: some tribute. The Ashton “Valse” was beautifully revived for the Royal Ballet School in 2019 and 2024 – but, like other Royal Ballet heirlooms (the Nijinska-Stravinsky-Goncharova “Les Noces”, the Nijinska-Poulenc-Laurencin “Les Biches”, the Ashton-Ravel-Craxton “Daphnis and Chloë”), it doesn’t suit O’Hare’s dull taste. Kenneth MacMillan’s “La Fin du jour” (1979) is an odd work, with its playful imagery of golf and swimming and airplanes, but it’s a revealing response to the combination of chic, artifice, mechanism, and fantasy in Ravel’s score: you may be sure that O’Hare has avoided it. In 1996, the the company (then directed by Anthony Dowell) presented a Ravel quadruple bill of “La Valse” and “Daphnis” (Ashton), “Fin du jour”, and the world premiere of Wheeldon’s “Pavane”. No such Ravel events have occurred at Covent Garden in the twenty first century.

Yet the imagination of most Ravel music is already halfway to theatre. When the London Symphony Orchestra played his “Histoires naturelles” this March with the baritone Stéphane Degout, it was easy to imagine the surrralism that an enterprising choreographer could bring to it. In 2027, David Hockney will be ninety. Could Covent Garden revive Ravel’s “L’Enfant et les Sortilèges” with his 1983 designs? It was for a ballet in London in 1919 that Ravel’s orchestral version of “Alborada del Gracioso” had its premiere (commissioned by Diaghilev). Wouldn’t the fabulous contrasts of this score make a marvellously theatrical challenge for one of today’s choreographers?

@Alastair Macaulay 2025

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