An underwhelming contribution to Ravel’s anniversary year
The Strad Issue: September 2025
Description: An underwhelming contribution to Ravel’s anniversary year
Musicians: Debussy Quartet, Franck Tortiller (vibraphone)
Works: Ravel: String Quartet; Ma mère l’oye (arr. Brunier). Tortiller: Les danses de Ravel (after Le tombeau de Couperin)
Catalogue number: HARMONIA MUNDI HMM905403
Ravel’s 150th-birthday year has prompted a number of releases offering novel juxtapositions and arrangements, and the Debussy Quartet is doing its bit here, along with French jazz vibraphonist Franck Tortiller.
Recordings of Ravel’s String Quartet – even good ones – are numerous, and there’s sadly little that stands out here. While the performance is technically assured, the supple phrasing and magical tonal qualities essential to this composer’s music are underdone. On the one hand, the blend doesn’t hold, yet on the other, solo themes don’t rise sufficiently out of the texture. The pizzicato-dense, rhythmically motoric second movement is slightly limp and the third movement feels contained rather than expanding outwards. It’s only really in the finale – suitably taut and urgent – that the performance hits its mark.
In an arrangement of the Mother Goose suite by the quartet’s former cellist Alain Brunier, there’s not quite enough atmospheric or coloristic effect, and Franck Tortiller’s suite based on Le tombeau de Couperin seems to dilute the effect of the original without adding enough to make it ear-catchingly distinctive. Though by no means poor, this is nevertheless a project whose strong promise on paper hasn’t quite been realised in practice.
EDWARD BHESANIA
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