Les Métaboles are spoiling us this spring. After exploring last year the rarely performed Another Look at Harmony by Philip Glass — and releasing a superb recording of it on b.records — Léo Warynski and his singers return to the same label with an album entitled Singing Ravel. Nearly an hour of choral music drawn from the composer from Ciboure? The idea may seem surprising at first, given that his entire output in the genre amounts to the Trois Chansons for unaccompanied choir — barely seven minutes of music in total.
Hidden harmonies and colours
Inspired by the example of highly successful transcriptions such as La Vallée des cloches, no. 5 of the piano cycle Miroirs adapted by Clytus Gottwald to a poem by Paul Verlaine — a version which, as Warynski notes, “offers a new perspective on Ravel’s music by revealing hidden harmonies and colours” — the conductor decided to go further down this path, with the aim of including in his Ravel programme a transcription of the famous Bolero. As with La Vallée des cloches, Thierry Machuel’s adaptation of Le Jardin féerique from Ma Mère l’Oye (set to a text by Benoît Richter) and the Trois Chansons had already appeared on a previous recording released in 2020 (Jardin féerique / NoMadMusic), but one is hardly going to complain about hearing them again in a live recording made on 10 May 2025 at the Philharmonie de Paris — with all the energy that such conditions bring. The disc also offers, again in Machuel’s arrangements, the Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant (from Ma Mère l’Oye), Soupir (from the Trois Poèmes de Mallarmé) in Gottwald’s version, and – adapted by Gérard Pesson, a true goldsmith of sound – Ronsard à son âme and two excerpts from Shéhérazade (La Flûte enchantée, L’Indifférent), all delivered with astonishing refinement by Warynski and his singers.
A bold undertaking…
Yet it is Thibault Perrine’s work that draws particular attention, given the “status” in posterity of two of the pieces he tackled. Alongside “Adieu, pastourelles” (from L’Enfant et les sortilèges), he has taken on Ravel’s most famous piano work, Pavane pour une infante défunte, and his most universally known orchestral score: Bolero. It was a daring move — and an absolute triumph, enough to melt the hearts of even the most purist music lovers.
The two works frame the programme. It opens with a Pavane whose lyricism perfectly matches the text of “Belle qui tient ma vie”, itself a pavane written at the end of the sixteenth century by the Dijon-born composer Thoinot Arbeau (1520–1595). At the other end of the recording, the famous Bolero is no less compelling. No text is used in this transcription — only an astonishingly inventive play, fully attuned to the specific qualities of the voices that make up Les Métaboles, on phonemes, onomatopoeia, and body percussion. An adaptation that highlights both the individual resources and the collective cohesion of one of our most admirable and daring choral ensembles.