Pianist Nelson Goerner and the Monte Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra, conductor Kazuki Yamada - Music Box, October 6th, 2025

An album released on September 19th, 2025, by Alpha Classics, featuring Maurice Ravel's two concertos for piano and orchestra, as well as several pieces for solo piano, including the famous Pavane for a Dead Princess.

In its presentation of the disc, Alpha Classics mentions that Nelson Goerner, one of the great pianists of our time, with an important international career, had always wanted to record Maurice Ravel's two concertos - and, of course, 2025, the 150th anniversary of Ravel's birth, was the most appropriate time to do so.

The two Ravel concertos are very different from each other, although they were composed at the same time and premiered in the same year, 1932, the first, in G major, in Paris, and the second, for the left hand, in Vienna.

The Concerto in G major presents the challenge of its jazzy style, but also one of the most refined and sensitive pieces of 20th-century music, the second movement, with its long piano solo melody. Nelson Goerner, alongside the Monte Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Kazuki Yamada, offers a robust version, with a full sound, but not without lyricism. Perhaps a more intellectual version, but at the same time, one that had something unique to say-which is no small matter in the world of uniformity in which we live.

On the same disc, Maurice Ravel's Noble and Sentimental Waltzes, for which I think Musiq3's review is very fitting: "Ravel is vigorous, fleshy, and firm here, sometimes very free."

"The pianist, conductor, and orchestra are in unison, offering a performance like a high flight in which everyone is moving in the same direction. One of the great albums to remember among the many recordings released for the Year of Ravel."

These are some of the words used by international critics to describe the album you are listening to today, a Ravel album performed by pianist Nelson Goerner and the Monte Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Kazuki Yamada. These words are all the more valid for the interpretation of Maurice Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand, a work in which we find both the vigor and the lyrical force of the Argentine pianist, whom we have had the opportunity to admire several times in Romania, most recently on September 14th at the Romanian Athenaeum in Bucharest, during the George Enescu Festival, when, alongside the same Monte Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Kazuki Yamada, he performed the same concerto for the left hand by Ravel.