Claire-Marie Le Guay STRAVINSKY Petrouchka RAVEL Daphnis et Chloé

This disc is advertised as ‘transcriptions pour piano par les auteurs’. Question: what is the difference between a transcription, an arrangement, a reduction and a concert version? Answer: it seems to be a grey area. And in this case the greyness could easily mislead buyers into thinking they are getting something that they are not. 

Stravinsky made the rationale behind the Trois mouvements for piano as clear as could be: ‘I tried to make of this Petrushka an essentially pianistic work using the resources of that instrument and without assigning it in any way a role as imitator’ (a lecture in 1935). Even though the piano was already integral to the work’s original conception, Stravinsky was careful to choose those parts of the ballet that would come off in the solo piano medium, and then felt free to play around with the text.

Ravel’s piano score of Daphnis, variously described here as a ‘transcription’ and a ‘version de concert’, is in fact, as I understand these terms, neither. Nor is it the version referred to in the booklet as the piano score completed on May 1, 1910, since this did not include the definitive ending, which is played here. What Claire-Marie le Guay does play – and with at times breathtaking virtuosity – is no more than the piano score prepared by Ravel for the use of the choreographer Fokine during the 1912 rehearsals. In my view it is a piano reduction, with most of what that word implies. Not to beat about the bush, the atmospheric moments in the score simply don’t work, and the slow chords of the choral link into the Dawn Scene, frankly, sound silly. I was interested to see Bryce Morrison (11/03) confronting a similar problem in Biret’s recording of the Firebird piano score – and also coming up against the arrangement/transcription question. 

I first came across le Guay playing the Dutilleux Sonata, in a performance I admire very much (as, rather more importantly, does the composer). She throws off the Petrushka pieces with enormous élan and does her considerable best at every point in the Ravel. But I’m afraid the latter brought to mind images of women preachers and dogs walking on their hind legs. In the enthusiasm to find ‘new’ pieces by the great composers this is, in my view, a ballet too far. (Gramophone)