Nash Ensemble: Ravel album review catches the music's dazzling light and intriguing shade

"This all-Ravel recording by the Nash Ensemble was the final project of Amelia Freedman's extraordinary 60 years as artistic director, and it's a fitting farewell to the group's much-missed founder, who died in July. It includes all three larger chamber works plus the composer's own two-piano arrangement of his orchestral masterpiece La Valse: Alasdair Beatson and Simon Crawford-Phillips are a polished team in this, sounding wonderfully louche early on and then dispatching fistfuls of notes and long glissandos with seeming ease, all while catching the music's increasingly sinister nature."

"The 1905 Introduction and Allegro was a commission from a harp manufacturer, intended to make their instrument sound good which it duly does as played by Lucy Wakeford, although what is most striking is the way the seven instruments coalesce and separate to create kaleidoscopic textural interest."

"Indeed, as confirmed by their quicksilver, sometimes excitably fierce String Quartet and especially by their vibrant performance of the Piano Trio, it's the attention to the details of colour and tone that really makes these performances take flight, the instruments combining to catch the dazzling light and intriguing shade that are such intrinsic features of Ravel's music."

The Nash Ensemble presents an all-Ravel program that gathers three larger chamber works and Ravel's own two-piano arrangement of La Valse. Amelia Freedman's sixty-year tenure as artistic director culminated in this final project, marking a tribute to the ensemble's founder. Alasdair Beatson and Simon Crawford-Phillips perform La Valse with a louche elegance that shifts into muscular, sinister passages. Lucy Wakeford's harp in the Introduction and Allegro highlights the instrument while the seven players frequently coalesce and separate to produce kaleidoscopic textures. The String Quartet and Piano Trio emphasize colour and tone, delivering dazzling light and intriguing shade intrinsic to Ravel.

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