Despite a healthy output of vocal works, Maurice Ravel wrote only three pieces for unaccompanied choir. But the choral director Léo Warynski, in a recent album with Les Métaboles, poses the question: Why not turn the “singing” quality that suffuses this composer’s instrumental writing into actual song? Such an exercise requires both textual curation and a deft hand with transcriptions, but the results place even Ravel’s most familiar pieces in a new light.

Singing Ravel is part performance of and part imaginative response to the composer’s music, combining existing all-vocal transcriptions of orchestral and operatic selections with two new arrangements. At times, the poetic choices are clever and moving. The already lovely “Pavane pour une Infante Défunte” here takes an achingly romantic text from Thoinot Arbeau’s 16th-century manual on Renaissance dance, “Orchésographie,” a nod to the original’s dancing title and to Arbeau’s own late-Renaissance vocal pavane on the same text. A wordless transcription of “Boléro” features onomatopoeic vocal gestures, buzzy hums and whistles that at once bring the lush orchestration of the original into a tight timbral focus and enliven the album’s sonic palette. Sometimes stunning, sometimes a bit silly, this is all in all a worthwhile experiment.

A recording of a concert given in March 2025 at the Cité de la Musique in Paris’s 19th arrondissement, marking the composer’s 150th anniversary. Singing Ravel, by the choir Les Métaboles, founded in 2010 by Léo Warynski, feels perfectly timed now that we’ve switched to daylight saving time. From Thibault Perrine’s introductory transcription of the Pavane pour une infante défunte to the hilarious closing Boléro, and through the spellbinding Soupirs, La Vallée des cloches, and L’Indifférent—transcribed by Clytus Gottwald and Gérard Pesson—this album is not only marvelous and enchanting; it also casts a fresh inner light on the splendor and harmonic daring of the French genius.

A cappella choral music is in the spotlight these days.
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On the same level—though Ravel never ventured into the religious or liturgical realm—the formidable Métaboles, conducted by Léo Warynski, captivate audiences with these choral transcriptions of some of the greatest works by the composer of Boléro: Singing Ravel. Recorded live at the Philharmonie de Paris (b.records/Outhere). The Ravelian grace—and precision!—of the orchestration is, in a way, sublimated by this shift to an “all‑voice” texture, rich in timbres and sonorities that are quite literally unheard of. The gentle enchantment of the Pavane for a Dead Princess, the harmonic ecstasy of Soupir, and the electrifying interweaving of The Magic Flute (excerpt from Shéhérazade) will stay with you for a long time.