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Ravel: Complete Piano Works on CD

Konstantinos Destounis has made a speciality of Ravel's piano works, playing them in concert on many occasions including a two-night survey of the whole solo-piano output, at the conservatoire in Athens last November. He made this recording around the same time, and captures the sense of music on the wing, still wet on the page from the pen of it's fastidious creator.

Born in Athens in 1991, Destounis studied in Thessaloniki and at the Mozarteum in Salzburg before taking his Masters at the Royal College of Music in London. He competed with distinction in many European piano competitions, winning First Prize at the 2015 Murcia International Piano Competition and second prize at the Liszt Society Piano Competition held in London that year.

On this album, his first major recording, he reveals himself to be a compelling interpreter of music which still sets a benchmark among pianists for technical finesse and musicianship. For Ravel, as for Beethoven and Stravinsky, the craft of composition was an essentially pianistic endeavour. While his image has become fixed in popular reception by masterpieces of orchestral colour such as Bolero, La valse and Daphnis et Chloe, the composer regarded the processes of composition and orchestration as separate. He remarked to his student Vaughan Williams that 'without a piano one cannot invent new harmonies'.

Ravel paid tribute to his teacher Gabriel Faure as 'the origin of whatever pianistic innovation my works may be thought to contain'. All the same, the pianistic influence of Saint-Saens makes it's presence felt too, and Chabrier in the early pieces. Perhaps Ravel becomes more himself in each successive piece, from the Serenade Grotesque of 1892-93 through to Le tombeau de Couperin of 1914-17, but the process is one of refinement rather than radical transformation, taking in the darkly disturbing imagery of Gaspard de la nuit, which rapidly assumed totemic significance within the modern piano literature.

- The year 2025 marks the 150th anniversary of French composer Maurice Ravel (1875-1937). Piano Classics is proud to issue a new recording of his complete piano works, played by the dazzling young Greek pianist Konstantinos Destounis.

- Ravel's piano music includes works of striking virtuosity, poetic delicacy, and rhythmic complexity. Jeux d'eau (1901) introduced shimmering water-like effects, influencing later Impressionist composers. His Miroirs (1904-1905), a five-piece suite, features the evocative Une barque sur l'ocean and the mesmerizing Alborada del gracioso, blending Spanish rhythms with intricate textures. Gaspard de la nuit (1908), one of the most technically demanding piano works, includes the infamous Scarbo, a nightmarish, virtuosic tone poem. Ravel also embraced neoclassicism, as seen in Le Tombeau de Couperin (1914-1917), a Baroque-style suite dedicated to World War I soldiers. His Valses nobles et sentimentales (1911) pays homage to Schubert while infusing modern harmonies. Other notable works include Pavane pour une infante defunte and Menuet sur le nom d'Haydn.

- Konstantinos Destounis was born in 1991 in Athens, Greece. By winning several international competitions he quickly builds his career, playing in important venues around the world. His pianism is of the highest order, a virtuosity which doesn't want to impress for it's own sake. He possesses a keen sense for the subtle harmonics, colours and atmospheres of these works of genius. He plays each work organically, bringing out the inner logic, power and beauty, eschewing all extravagance or exhibitionism (Ravel himself wanted his works "to be played, not interpreted").