A RAVEL PIANO MARATHON
Yong Siew Toh Conservatory
Piano Department
YST Recording Studio
Friday (7 November 2025)
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of French composer Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), and no celebration is complete without a survey of his piano music. Although he was no piano virtuoso, he was responsible for some of the classical repertoire’s most technically demanding solo works.
It lasted the best part of four hours included two short toilet breaks. It could have been even longer had Stefan Xie Lingfei, who was to play Miroirs, not headed to Shanghai for a competition. Furthermore, the two piano versions of Introduction & Allegro (originally for harp and chamber musicians) and La Valse had been omitted. Somehow Entre Cloches from Sites Auriculaires had also gone missing. Nonetheless, it was still an enthralling evening of great music, totally satisfying for the small audience in attendance.
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| Albert Tiu gave a short preamble on Maurice Ravel's piano styles and themes to be found in this event. |
This is not an actual review (The Straits Times had rejected a proposal because of budget cuts) but a recounting of the sequence of performances (who played what and when) with a few personal remarks and observations, and photos of all players have been included.
1710 hours: The Ravel Marathon commenced, opening on two pianos with the Fanfare from L’éventail de Jeanne (Jean’s Fan, 1927), a ballet with ten composers contributing to the cause. Ravel’s short number was the first, a polytonal march with mock military pretenses performed by Ng Kye Lie and Tara Ng. The duo continued with Ravel’s “work without music”, Boléro (1929) which built up to a stirring crescendo. This transcription felt a little dry despite the clever use of harmonics in one variation, but there’s no faulting the rhythmic precision from the duo.
1729 hours: Fong Jean Ying was next with three short and quiet simple pieces. Prélude in A minor (1913) was written as a sight-reading test, while the Menuet in C# minor (1904) was so short – blink and it's over. Menuet sur le nom Haydn (1909), built around the five notes that spelt Haydn’s name (B natural-A-D-D-G) with inversion and spelt backwards, was innocuous good fun, and realised well in her performance.
1733 hours: The six dance pieces of Le tombeau de Couperin (1914–7), composed in memory of friends who died in the Great War, was shared by three pianists. Xian Ruofei accounted for the flowing Prélude in a fluidly virtuosic account, while the academic Fugue that followed was played with total clarity with all voices well accounted for.
1742 hours: Berry Wong was responsible for the two central dances, Forlane and Rigaudon, which were quirkily rhythmic in character. The former could have been dressed in more humour while the latter was overly percussive, thus rendering it mostly charmless.
1753 hours: No worries after that with Toby Tan Kai Rong to the rescue. The Menuet was kept simple as the charm returned while the coruscating Toccata, the recital first out-and-out technical challenge, made for a brilliant close to the neo-baroque suite. His exemplary pedaling kept up the showpiece’s melodic interest without making its barnstorming sound too dry.
1802 hours: Despite a couple of memory lapses, Mi Maw Li Awng gave a musical and sensitive account of the Pavane pour une infante défunte (1899). In this case, the princess was dead, but not the pavane. Thank goodness.
1810 hours: The concert’s first third closed with the Mother Goose Suite, or Ma mère l’oye (1908-10), performed by four hands on a single keyboard by Nie Likun and Lin Sin-Yue. A fairy-tale atmosphere was established in the Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty, while bird-calls distinguished the forest wander of Petit Poucet (Tom Thumb). The pentatonic wonderland of gamelans and bells was conjured with much vividness in Laideronette, Empress of the Pagodas. Conversations of Beauty and the Beast contrasted the graceful with the gauche, while the Fairy’s Garden completed this lovely retreat into childhood. The performance was excellent all round.
1837 hours: With Shéhérazade, Ouverture de féerie (1898), the fairy overture written for an opera that never came to fruition, we arrived at the first transcription that sounded truly orchestral (Bolero does not count, unfortunately). The duo of Goh Kai Cheng and Chen Xing-Chi truly did justice to this very colourful score that deserves to be better known.
1851 hours: Menuet antique (1895) needs more love, because Darrell Lim played as if he hated every moment of it. Ravel does not need such crudeness and dessiccated sound.
1858 hours: Much relief came with the three-movement Sonatine (1903–5) from Kuo Lyu-Cen, which flowed with fluidity and lyricism. The central Mouvement de Menuet glowed with warmth, while the animated finale could have been taken a little faster for greater effect.
1911 hours: The very obscure La Parade (1896) sounds like movements by Chabrier and Satie – marches, waltzes and a mazurka - cobbled together like some rondeau pompeux. At least Zhang Huaxuan took it seriously by giving it his best shot, making it sound engaging and interesting. Did anyone notice an allusion to Scarbo in one of the interludes?
1923 hours: A much more mature and familiar work is Valses nobles et sentimentales (1911), a suite of eight varied waltzes inspired by Schubert’s own set. Jiang Qifan played it with spirit and verve, with the romping seventh waltz being a premonition of La Valse to come.
1938 hours: These two little tributes in the style of other composers, A la manière de Borodine and A la manière de Chabrier (1912–3), are a waltz and aria improvisation after Gounod’s Faust respectively. Chiu Pin-Hsin gave them the love they deserved despite their diminutive nature.
1943 hours: In lieu of the two-piano version, La Valse (1920) for two hands received a suitably thunderous reading from Chakrit Khanonvej, who liberally added notes of his own. Ravel’s score had a third stave which was open season to do whatever one desired.
2006 hours: The marathon’s final third opened with the most obscure score of some familiar orchestral music: Daphnis et Chloé Fragments Symphoniques (1912), comprising three rather substantial movements, Danse de Daphnis, Nocturne – Interlude - Danse Guerrière and Scene de Daphnis et Chloé. Despite being non-canonical, Tang Ke gave a performance of much colour and texture, and her pacing of this music was impeccable, which suggests she could become a conductor in the future.
2028 hours: Sérénade grotesque (1893) by the teenaged Ravel was his earliest piano work. Its Spanish rhythms looked forward to Alborada del gracioso (sadly not to be heard this evening) while its percussive beat to Bartok’s Allegro Barbaro. Chen Bo-Yu looked like he enjoyed it, and so did the audience which was laughing by its end.
2032 hours: Now we’ve reached the impressionist spectrum of Ravel’s oeuvre, with Jeux d’eau (1901) given a shimmering performance by Lin Shih-En, which had colour and many nuances in between. Here, Ravel was influenced by Franz Liszt and his depiction of fountains at Rome’s Villa d’Este.
2038 hours: Every person who had stayed up this long was rewarded with a quite spectacular performance of Gaspard de la nuit (1908) by Chai Zi Qing. She held a Venus-like grip on her audience if one can hear past her audible Gouldian humming, beginning with Ondine’s watery spell with very fine and detailed tremolos. The glissandi and arpeggios were simply spellbinding. The tolling B flats were hypnotic in Le gibet while Scarbo scampered with a wild abandon that defined the Gothic horror of this masterpiece.
2103 hours: Finally it was the turn of the two piano professors, Albert Tiu and Ning An who closed the evening’s fantastic smorgasbord. Frontispice (1918) qualifies as Ravel’s weirdest work, just two minutes of polytonal musings and five bars of birdcalls played by a fifth hand (Toby Tan doing the honours), before a sequence of crescendo chords looking ahead to the sound world of Olivier Messiaen.
2106 hours: Rapsodie Espagnole (1907) was the final work on two pianos by Albert Tiu and Ning An, four movements of impressionist and Iberian beauty - Prélude à la nuit, Malagueña, Habanera (originally from Site Auriculaires) and the rousing Feria to close. Has there been a better way to celebrate the greatness of Maurice Ravel? This absorbing journey from the Belle Epoque, neoclassicism to Impressionism was one to remember.
The Ravel Marathon officially ended at 2121 hours, and to think it could have continued to 2230 hours had missing pieces of the jigsaw been found. But what a journey that was, and one could only be happy and grateful for having been there to witness it all. If one missed Sir Stephen Hough this evening, he will return to the SSO sometime soon, but when will there next be another Ravel rave? Sometime in 2037 or 2075, but don’t hold your breath!
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