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.