RAVEL: Complete Mélodies [CD de audio] Monica Piccinini, Elisabetta Lombardi, Christian Immler, Filippo Farinelli, ECU Ensemble

French composer Maurice Ravel may be well known for his instrumental music, in particular the orchestral work Bolero, but it is his vocal compositions that fully encapsulate the shimmering colours of early-20th-century music. Spanning an important period of Ravels career, from 1893 up to 1932, this release is an integral recording of Ravels songs, with both piano accompaniment and Ravels original scoring for ensemble. Many of the works reveal Ravels affinity with other cultures and his penchant for the exotic; from the Chansons madecasses, or Madagascan songs, to the Spanish-themed Habanera (a tribute to his part-Basque heritage) and the Cinq Melodies populaires grecques, Ravel used the freedom of rarely-explored cultures to throw off his usual restraint and employ new, exciting harmonies and musical innovations. His use of dissonances comes to the fore in this last work, particularly on the second and seventh notes. At other points, he experimented with bitonality, as in the Trois Poèmes de Stephane Mallarme, clearly influenced by Stravinsky and Schoenberg, which reveal a new penchant for challenging conventional harmony. His careful scoring, however Ravel saw the orchestration of his music as a task equally as demanding as composition allows the delicacy of the music to shine through. This album contains all of Ravels vocal music, featuring four renowned singers supported by the Ensemble Contemporaneo dellUmbria. Soprano Monica Piccinini, a major operatic performer who is debuting at La Scala later in 2015, is joined by mezzo-sopranos Elisabetta Lombardi and Sophie Marilley, both of whom have performed in opera houses across Europe, and German baritone Christian Immler, whose previous CD releases have been awarded the prestigious Diapason dOr and Diapason Decouverte