The first disc of Ludovic Morlot’s Ravel survey with the Barcelona orchestra of which he’s been music director since 2022 appeared last year. That included two of Ravel’s best known scores: the suite Le Tombeau de Couperin and the ballet Mother Goose. At the heart of this latest instalment are Ravel’s three orchestral song cycles: the mezzo soprano Fleur Barron sings Shéhérazade, the 1904 settings of poems by Tristan Klingsor, and the 1913 Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, while between them the baritone Alexandre Duhamel is the soloist in the charming product of Ravel’s old age, which was originally intended as a film score, Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, from 1933.
For all the oriental beauty of Shéhérazade, delivered with suitably seductive warmth by Barron, it is the Mallarmé miniatures that shine most brightly here, with Morlot carefully teasing out the instrumental strands of the accompanying ensemble, beautifully played by the Barcelona soloists, to create a shimmering web around Barron’s lucid shaping of the vocal lines. Duhamel is equally meticulous in his presentation of the Quichotte numbers, though he, and perhaps Morlot, too, sometimes seems a little restrained when a bit more earthiness would be appropriate.
The three sets of songs are framed by purely orchestral pieces, opening with the fanfare that Ravel composed for the collective ballet for children L’Éventail de Jeanne, to which Roussel, Poulenc and Milhaud were also among the contributors, and ending with Ravel’s own orchestrations of his Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, given a slightly louche but thoroughly appropriate edge by Morlot.
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