Not all of us may be deeply acquainted with the work of Lebanese
pianist and composer, Abdel Rahman El Bacha, but he has been
around for many years, appearing on the international scene
at the age of 19 in June 1978 when he won first prize at the
Queen Elisabeth of Belgium Competition. Steadily building a
career through the 1980s and 1990s, he has appeared in just
about every major European venue you can name, and tours widely
with - and has recorded - a huge repertoire of solo works and
concertos.
Something which can immediately be said about this set is that
it is superlatively well recorded. Even in normal stereo the
piano sound is full-range, rich and detailed, the SACD stereo
layer giving that extra sense of depth and presence. The five
channel surround effect gives you the feeling you are being
given a private recital at a top venue, even if your set-up
is not quite the same as specified in the diagram in the booklet
with further explanation in Japanese.
I don’t know quite how he does it, but El Bacha manages to give
relatively straightforward performances of Ravel’s refined masterpieces,
at the same time making the music highly attractive and desirable.
By straightforward I really do mean that the playing is direct
and, well, straight. At first my response led me to think in
terms of four-square playing, perhaps too uninvolved and lacking
in poetry, but the more I listen the more I have the sense of
‘something going on’, hard to pin down initially, but constantly
drawing me back. Take that old favourite the Pavane pour
une infante défunte. Almost any decent performance will
have you humming along, but El Bacha stops you doing this –
making you listen rather than turning the music into a bathroom
favourite. Why is this? There isn’t a great deal of obvious
‘phrasing’ going on, the tempo stays constant, with the inflections
demanded by the score present but not over-emphasised. This
isn’t ‘flat’ playing by any means, but by a well considered
lack of added interpretation El Bacha is bringing us what Ravel
intended – what he wrote, rather than a pianist’s show of how
well he can extend a melodic line or how deeply he ‘feels’ the
music. I believe this is the clue to appreciating this Ravel
piano cycle, and once you’ve accepted that this pianist is going
to take a back seat to the composer, you will find a great deal
to appreciate in this set.
French flavour is an important element in several of these pieces,
and the Sonatine exemplifies the kind of harmonies and
melodic gestures which are shared by composers and others in
a Paris circle vibrant with impressionism and a general sense
of relaxed joie de vivre. The music certainly calls Erik
Satie to mind, to name just one. El Bacha conjures all this
very well, but confronts us with another phenomenon in his playing
in the final Animé movement, the ability to create atmosphere
and swift washes of colour while at the same time retaining
absolute clarity and a sense of articulation within every note.
There is a very prominent ‘cool spot’ in this kind of playing,
which stays true to the letter of the score and retains absolute
control. The risk is inevitably that such an approach becomes
rather dull, but I have yet to find myself bored by these recordings.
El Bacha and I share something in both being composers, so I
will be the first to hold up my hand and acknowledge that these
might be performances which, while keeping faith with Ravel’s
notated legacy, hold back on the sense of risk and sheer excitement
which a truly flamboyant extrovert virtuoso might be expected
to provide – a sort of ‘live’ vibe in the recording. Listen
to the marvels of subtlety and inflection in Miroirs however,
and then tell me you wouldn’t like to have this as a reference
when you want to hear what Ravel is all about, rather than the
flashes of brilliance from one or other brilliant pianist. There
is no lack of virtuosity here – indeed, El Bacha has chops to
spare, but respect for the composer takes first place, and this
is something I applaud in a recording to which one will want
to return more than once in a blue moon.
Central to any collection of Ravel’s solo piano music is Gaspard
de la nuit, and in the first movement Ondine El Bacha’s
secret is unpeeled a little further. Compared even with a very
high class recording like that of Roger Muraro on the Accord
label, El Bacha’s evenness of touch and ability to make every
note sound without relinquishing lightness of touch and inner
contrast is something of a revelation. You have to get used
to being able to hear everything, of having every note present
and correct. This is something which initially seems to take
away something of the spontaneous, of the wild and quicksilver,
but you look at Ravel’s fastidiousness both as a man and as
a composer and you realise this is perhaps not what he was about
– at least, not as much as you might believe from some performances.
El Bacha’s playing is remarkably telling, expressing the heart
of the score with precision and accuracy, and still generating
a strong sense of atmosphere and ‘soul’. This is also true of
Le gibet, where once again the music is evenly paced
and the phrasing kept within strict boundaries, but the feeling
in the music is still effectively present, and is very moving.
How refreshing it is to hear all those repeated notes and every
inflection of those mad traversals of the keyboard in the Scarbo
movement - a thrilling and extremely dynamic ride it is
too.
You will by now have divined that, after a few initial doubts
fuelled by preconception, I am now entirely sold on Ravel as
played by Abdel Rahman El Bacha. This remains entirely true,
although after a magnificent Gaspard de la nuit I do
have one or two reservations. One thing El Bacha seems reluctant
to do is to allow the ‘dance’ music to really dance. Menuet
sur le nom de Haydn is admittedly less of a dancy number
despite the ‘Menuet’ title, and the very straight reading we
have here does build to a fine climax. The concerns setting
in at this point do however transfer themselves to the Valses
nobles et sentimentales. El Bacha’s timings are on the whole
a little longer than many, and though these differences might
not seem much, in such short pieces they do indicate a broader
view of certain tempi, and the impetus for a dance ‘feel’ is
therefore sometimes not achieved. There is a kind of bounce
demanded of these and indeed all waltzes, and El Bacha bounces
not. Take that delightful little Moderé, the third of
the cycle. The tempo doesn’t drag, but neither does it pitch
one forward into a sense of physical movement. The effect of
the rhythmic variations in the piece are as a result also rather
lost – not that they are not present, but the 1-2, 1-2 moments
have a ‘so what’ feel, rather than wrong-footing the active
listener. The following Assez animé is much more entertaining
however, and El Bacha relishes those little runs and the stop-start
feel to this particular quasi-waltz. The Presque lent is
nicely atmospheric, but falls a little in between being a dream
of a dance or an actual waltz. The Vif is also good,
but doesn’t have quite the wit and sense of fun that hobbling
bass line suggests. None of these points are crucially damning
and these performances are all finely turned, but the care El
Bacha gives to his playing of Ravel means than the kind of abandon
or extremes of mood which make these waltzes dance and ‘live’
doesn’t transfer quite as well to this form as with other works
in the set. The ‘sentimental’ aspect of the music is another
point which might have been more deeply observed. The introduction
of the penultimate dance for instance, Moins vif, seems
to have a potentially endless duration in Roger Muraro’s hands,
where here it is superbly played, but without that excruciatingly
delicious sense of anticipation that it can have.
Le Tombeau de Couperin comes last in this chronologically
ordered set. Again, ordered and taking care of every detail,
El Bacha is accurate and refined rather than dashingly exciting.
Like a well played scale or etude however, accuracy and evenness
generates its own sense of speed, and the music here doesn’t
drag or seem particularly slow. El Bacha doesn’t go out of his
way to give highly defined character to each voice of the Fugue,
but elsewhere all of Ravel’s fascinating traditional forms are
portrayed with an appropriately restrained or eloquent character.
The opening of the Rigaudon is especially energetic,
the sound of the pianist’s fingers striking the keys resonating
clearly, and El Bacha’s skill with repeated notes makes for
a stunning Toccata with which to conclude the set.
There are numerous highly respectable and critically acclaimed
sets of Ravel’s piano music, Angela
Hewitt on Hyperion and Jean-Efflam
Bavouzet on MDG to name just two. My own reference has for
a while been Roger Muraro on the Accord label, 476 0941, who
has a stylish way of bringing out aspects of Ravel’s style and
idiom which are more often glossed over, and if anything has
an even richer palette of pianistic colours to his credit than
anyone I can name, even though El Bacha has him on the ropes
when it comes to evenness and accuracy. Nothing El Bacha does
takes anything away from a wealth of fine and well established
recordings, but if you want to have the feeling of getting close
to the ideas of the composer, and want to enter the game of
‘how does he do that?’, then Abdel Rahman El Bacha has
a very great deal to offer. Add all of this to demonstration
sound quality and well written booklet notes by Gerald Larner,
and I think we end up with something like a resounding recommendation.
Dominy Clements
Abdel Rahman El Bacha (piano) 
[61:57 + 69:19] 
