Ravel: Boléro

LATINO GOLD is a repackage of Milos’ stunning 2012 album Latino. The CD will feature the original album plus approximately 20 minutes of newly recorded material including:

Classic Latin hits ‘Besame Mucho’, ‘Girl from Ipanema’, ‘Mas que nada’ and ‘Somos Novios’, all newly arranged for solo guitar by Sergio Assad.

Gustavo Santaolalla's De Ushuaia a la Quaica from the Motorcycle Diaries soundtrack.

A new radio and TV friendly short version of Ravel's Bolero, arranged for Solo Guitar and Orchestra.

A new recording of the original Libertango arrangement.

This programme contains a representative collection of important works written between 1901 and 2000. This period is sometimes thought of as the era of ‘modern’ music, when composers sought to break free from the Romantic styles of the 19th century by experimenting with daring new harmonies and forms, but much of the music written after 1900 still harked back to the familiar style of the past. The first CD opens with composers who still wrote in the Romantic style, including Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Holst and Elgar, and we also hear part of the slow movement of the most successful concerto written during the 20th century, the Concierto de Aranjuez by Rodrigo. Then come the early innovators who broke new ground like the Second Viennese School of Webern, Berg and Schoenberg, as well as others who continued to use the more traditional methods of composition but who wrote in a more advanced style such as Stravinsky and Bartók. These are followed by later composers who wrote in a wide range of so-called ‘modern’ styles including Takemitsu, Tavener and Adès. The large and prolific school of American composers active during the 20th century is represented by some extremely popular pieces like Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, as well as more adventurous works by Ives, Reich and Adams. The set also includes extracts from choral pieces by Boulez, Pärt, Tavener, Rutter and Jenkins, and ends with one of the 20th century’s most successful choral works, Orff’s Carmina Burana.

Ravel orchestrated his piano pieces Alborada del gracioso and Pavane pour une infante défunte to great effect; the former gains in suggestive colour, and the latter evokes nostalgic pathos. Another orchestrated work is the Menuet antique, which is redolent of old French dance forms. Rapsodie espagnole, Ravel’s first major orchestral work, shimmers with expectancy and bursts into Spanish dance rhythms, themes he pursued in Pièce en forme de habanera. His earliest orchestral work, the ‘fairy overture’ Shéhérazade, is all that remains of a planned opera based on The Thousand and One Nights. The famous Boléro, an ‘orchestrated crescendo’ of undimmed power, has proved one of the most popular works in all classical music.

The best of Ravel, Ravel's greatest hits - they're all here on 2 CDs packed to the brim, containing all of Ravel's most memorable tunes.

Inevitably, the focus is on the immortal Bolero, beloved of the film industry. Ravel famously considered it to be his masterpiece, but claimed it had no music in it - an opinion with which many would take leave to disagree.

La Valse extends the theme of dance, the Rhapsodie espagnole the theme of Spanishry and exoticism, while the compilation ends with a flavour of jazz as exemplified in the Blues movement from the Violin Sonata and the Concerto for piano, left hand (which in the 1930s the famous pianist Alfred Cortot dared to play using both hands, incurring the composer's wrath).

Simon Rattle, now head of the Berlin Philharmonic, also produced some acclaimed records with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Ravel's "Boléro" and "Daphnis et Chloé" show him to be a true wizard of the rostrum who conjures up every facet of these colourful scores.

This collection encourages children to get up and moving! Featuring the best dance music in the Classical world this compilation will keep little ears occupied, exercise their bodies and challenge their imagination and memory. The collection features music from Tchaikovsky, Vivaldi, Grieg and Wagner and is carefully paced to build up the movement levels and expose children to many different dance styles, rhythms and tempos as possible.

Gloriously spectacular, yet exquisitely subtle, the orchestral music of Ravel requires players who can render its iridescent colours and intoxicating rhythms with both exuberance and accuracy. The conductor, meanwhile, must define its characteristic interplay of sensuality and delicacy, exhilaration and restraint, sentiment and irony. Here, in five of Ravel’s best-loved scores, The Philadelphia Orchestra and Riccardo Muti prove masterly in capturing the composer’s spirit and in evoking his exotic worlds.

Recording producers: John Culshaw (Glazunov); Victor Olof (Liszt); Ray Minshull (Ravel, Weber, Falla); Michael Williamson (Adam)

Recording engineers: Roy Wallace (Glazunov); James Brown (Liszt); Kenneth Wilkinson (Ravel, Weber, Falla); Ken Cress (Adam)

Recording locations: La Maison de la Mutualité, Paris, France, September 1954 (Liszt), May 1956 (Glazunov), October & November 1957 (Adam); La Maison de la Chimie, Paris, France, November 1958 (Ravel, Weber, Falla)

The recorded legacy of Albert Wolff is one of the most sought-after by collectors. Of Dutch parentage, but born in Paris, Wolff was something of a polymath: pianist, organist, conductor, composer, and had a long career in recording studios beginning in 1920. His first recordings for Decca, starting in the summer of 1951, were a complete Carmen (with Suzanne Juyol), a Manon (with Janine Micheau) as well as several French orchestral suites and individual pieces. By reciprocal arrangement with RCA that Decca had at the time, the abridged version of Giselle was issued on RCA in 1959 and had to wait fourteen years for its appearance on Decca, when it appeared on its ‘Eclipse’ imprint in 1973. This collection brings together balletic works by Glazunov, Ravel, Weber and Falla, together with Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody.