Maurice Ravel: L’Oeuvre Pour Piano Integrale – Alexandre Tharaud

   in Piano International (Mar, 2019)
There are at least two dozen ‘complete’ surveys of Ravel’s complete music for solo piano, some more complete than others. Alexandre Tharaud’s excellent new survey for Harmonia Mundi lays claim to be the most complete, as according to the text on the back cover a ‘notable feature of this recording is the presence of two previously unrecorded pieces: La Parade and the Minuet in C-sharp’. Sadly for Harmonia Mundi and Tharaud, however, this is not true. François- Joël Thiollier recorded La Parade (1896) for Naxos back in 1993 (8.550683), while Florian Uhlig included it and the Minuet (1904) in his Hänssler Classics survey in 2012 (HAEN93318, released September 2014). Thiollier’s performances …