Ravel / Freitas-Branco / Orchestre Du Théâtre Des Champs-Elysées: Bolero, etc.

In the history of many, many recordings of Bolero – Maurice Ravel’s notorious exercise in orchestration / journey into madness / journey into orgasm / way for any conductor to give every section leader a solo during an evening’s concert – how could any particular performance be more notable than another? In the case of this LP, this is a performance of Bolero that was conducted by a personal friend of Ravel who dared to pace it as a tempo as slow as the composer intended it to be performed, slower than Arturo Toscanini could stand, slow enough to make it, as Ravel wished, “unendurable”. For more background on this particular recording, here’s a slightly snipped 12-minute edit of a documentary by Carlos Hagen-Lautrup, long-time documentarian for KPFK in the 1970s and 1980s whose “Carlos Hagen Presents” show was a weekly fixture on the station for over a decade. This undated program from the early 1980s was dedicated to this recording of Bolero and Hagen talks about it in the context of Sufi mysticism and the trance-inducing minimalism of Terry Riley and Steve Reich.

Bolero

La Valse

Valses Nobles et Sentimentales

Alborada del Gracioso

Pavane pour une Infante Défunte

Album audio & artwork

DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.