Ravel/Gershwin: Piano Concertos / Grimaud

Amazon.com essential recording
This is one class act. Helene Grimaud generally prefers the heavy-duty German repertoire and has fought hard not to be typecast as a dainty "French" female pianist. Nevertheless she has expressed a certain affection for selected French and non-Germanic works, which is a good thing for us because this is the best performance of the Gershwin concerto we are ever likely to hear. It has style, warmth, and bravura to spare. In fact, everyone concerned treats it like it's the greatest piece of music in the world, and the same positives apply to the Ravel.

- David Hurwitz

This is a logical and satisfying coupling, and it is surprising that it hasn't been recorded more often. Both the Gershwin and Ravel concertos are heavily influenced by jazz. Gershwin's, written in 1925, is a strange mix of creative spontaneity and formal constraint. The fusion of popular and traditional elements clearly influenced Ravel, whose G major Concerto (completed in 1931) contains a seemingly incongruous, yet superbly constructed, juxtaposition of American blues and jazz, Iberian exoticism and neo-classicism.
Helene Grimaud offers a straightforwardly romantic view of these works, especially of the Gershwin. She seems happiest with broad melodic lines, such as in Gershwin's first movement, which she shapes with a wholly natural and unforced beauty. Other pianists may go for a more rhythmically buoyant and propulsive approach, further playing up the jazz impulse, but Grimaud's sincerity succeeds on its own terms. There are times — most notably the slow movement of the Ravel — where her playing strikes me as just a little too straitlaced, or emotionally restricted. In this movement, her left-hand-before-right mannerism (also a characteristic of Michelangeli's legendary recording, incidentally, although Grimaud is less convincing) may irritate some listeners. Like Michelangeli, though, she can never be accused of 'milking' the music, and Ravel, who believed that a concerto should be "light-hearted and brilliant, and not aim at profundity or at dramatic effects" would surely have approved.
So far as comparisons go, there may be more indispensable recordings of each of these works, but not of this coupling.

- Tim Parry, Gramophone

GEORGE GERSWIN:
Piano Concerto in F major:
I. Allegro
II. Adagio - Andante con moto
III. Allegro agitato

MAURICE RAVEL:
Piano Concerto in G major:
I. Allegramente
II. Allegro assai
III. Presto

HÉLÈNE GRIMAUD, piano
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
DAVID ZINMAN, conductor

Recording: Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, Baltimore, May 1997.

Download: part 1, part 2.
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