Maurice Ravel… An hour of music by the brilliant French composer.

Ravel was born in the Basque borderlands of France in 1875 and much of his music can be thought of as Spanish rhythms meeting French elegance. He was accepted into the Paris Conservatory as a teenager to study piano but instead focused on composition. For the first couple of decades of his adult career he was not welcomed by the musical establishment of the day. But especially after the First World War he came to be seen as a major figure and with increasing international success he was by the 1930s considered France’s greatest living composer. Ravel’s music in this episode is a section of his first Piano Concerto, the Pavane for a Dead Princess, a little taste of his String Quartet, his amazing orchestral work, La Valse or The Waltz, the ‘Blues’ section of his second Violin Sonata… and his rather popular ‘Bolero’.