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…