One of my all-time favourite recording series available on a single YouTube clip: Marcelle Meyers Ravel cycle from 1954, recorded for the French label Les Discophiles Français in the Salle Adyar studio on the left bank in Paris. Using a light-actioned Hamburg Steinway that somehow sounds more like a French piano (it was chosen for the label by Lili Kraus), Meyer plays with exquisite lightness, pliant phrasing, sparkling tone, transparent voicing, remarkably nuanced shadings, and a steady rhythmic pulse. Her tempi are brisk, and while some might balk at her pacing in the Pavane pour un infante défunte, for example, there are indications that the composer preferred such pacing (such as his statement that it be a pavane for a dead princess as opposed to a dead pavane for a princess). To my ears, the combination of steady rhythm and crystalline sonority she achieves in works like Jeux deau and Le tombeau de Couperin are reminiscent of the timepieces Ravel kept around his piano. It is worth noting that Meyer studied not only with Alfred Cortot (and Marguerite Long, before leaving for Cortot) but also with Ricardo Viñes, who premiered many of Ravels works, before having worked with the composer himself - she played the second piano part when he premiered La Valse for an audience consisting of Diaghilev, Stravinsky, and Poulenc (the score was poorly received, but Meyer was booked by Stravinsky to play his Petrouchka with Monteux). My only reservation about this Grand Prix du Disque-winning cycle is that the micing is too close in Menuet Antique and Valses nobles & sentimentales, so her tone sounds uncharacteristically bangy and harsh at moments in those works.
Posted on: Sat, 01 Nov 2014 18:39:50 +0000
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