iSound

The name Maurice Ravel, for many of us, conjures up elegance and refinement, a faint perfume of decadence, and decorous tributes to a bygone era. His Impressionist label elicits dreamy visions of fountains and dappled light. In the half century of musical exploration since his death we seem to have forgotten Ravel's stature as an intrepid experimentalist -- and nowhere was he more experimental than in Miroirs and Gaspard de la Nuit. One can see, looking backward through time, that many of the ideas audiences found so provocative in the works of Olivier Messiaen and Morton Feldman were first imagined by Maurice Ravel.

Ravel was thirty when he introduced Miroirs to the Apaches, a group of avant-garde painters, writers and musicians who shared their creations at regular meetings. The composer explained that this set "marks a change in my harmonic evolution considerable enough to disconcert the musicians who have been most accustomed to my style until now." In these f...