A Ravel Reader: Correspondence, Articles, Interviews.(Book Review)

A Ravel Reader: Correspondence, Articles, Interviews, compiled and edited by Arbie Orenstein. Dover Publications (31 E. 2nd St., Mineola, NY 11501), 2003. 617pp. $34.95.

A Ravel Reader provides provacative readings into the life and times of Maurice Ravel by presenting the composer in is own words, both written and spoken. The clarity, elegance, polish and sophistication we have come to appreciate in Ravel's music are abundantly clear in his letters, articles and press interviews as well. A Ravel Reader is an outgrowth of author Arbie Orenstein's previous study, Ravel: Man and Musician, published in 1975 by Columbia University Press.

A Ravel Reader is organized into four main sections. The first section is comprised of three selected documents, which give insight into Ravel's career and musical thought: an autobiographical sketch dictated by Ravel to his biographer Roland-Manuel; a brief statement on his own aesthetic entitled "Some Reflections on Music"; and the only formal lecture Ravel is known to have ever given, "Contemporary Music," which was delivered in 1928 in Houston, Texas.

The second section of the book includes a selection of 346 letters from the approximately 1,500 Ravel is known to have written during his lifetime. These correspondences give us an invaluable insight into Ravel's attitudes, emotions, travels and personal interests over a span of thirty-nine years. The earliest letter dates from Ravel's days as a student at the Paris Conservatoire, and the last was written only weeks before his death in 1937.

The ...