Having recorded all of Ravel’s solo piano music, it was natural for Alexandre Tharaud to turn his attention to the two piano concertos.
The performances are all that you would expect from this unfailingly stylish pianist, especially in the outer movements of the G major concerto, played with as much glitter and fizz as anyone could want, perhaps a little too much in the first movement, which seems rather brittle as a result. But the central Adagio is rather prosaic, as if Tharaud is unwilling to dig too deeply beneath the music’s suave surfaces, and in the Concerto for the Left Hand too, a dimension seems to be missing; what is one of Ravel’s darkest scores never suggests that sense of menace.
However, the inclusion of Manuel de Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain makes a honeyed bonus, with Louis Langrée and the French National Orchestra conjuring a luscious, evocative backdrop to the spangled solo piano writing, in which Tharaud is perfectly in his element.
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