Ravel at 150 — The Composer Who Painted with Sound

Tickets for the Ravel Music Festival are available here.

There's something almost magical about Maurice Ravel's music. As we celebrated his 150th birthday last March 7, 2025, that magic still captivates us, making us wonder how someone could create music that feels both perfectly calculated and completely natural.

"My mind is full of ideas, but when I want to write them down, they vanish,"

Ravel once said during his final years. Yet his music tells a different story. He is one of the composers who never let a good idea slip away without shaping it into something beautiful. Born in the small Basque village of Ciboure to a Swiss father and Basque mother, Ravel grew up to become what people called a "musical jeweller," someone whose careful attention to detail made even the most complex passages sound simple yet truly elegant.

Ravel built his music layer by layer, each instrument entering exactly when it should, creating something that feels both inevitable and surprising. It's architecture and painting combined, with every sound chosen for a reason, rhythm being there for a purpose.

"Ravel's music truly brings impressionism to life. You can easily get lost listening to his works... the way it creates images and emotions is through smudges of colors while bits of melody seem to appear and disappear," explains pianist Danica Mae Antazo. Ultimately, this captures something essential about Ravel's art: he doesn't just write music; he paints with sound.

Pianist Pauline Aguila describes listening to Ravel as feeling "like you're relaxing in the clouds... There's also darkness in the music, giving us performers something to think about." This mix of light and shadow, beauty and mystery, makes Ravel's music unlike anyone else's.

His student years at the Paris Conservatory shaped this unique approach. Though he famously failed to win the Prix de Rome several times, his studies with Gabriel Fauré taught him the value of clarity and careful craftsmanship. More importantly, his friendships with other artists in a group called "Les Apaches" opened his ears to music from Spain, literature from Edgar Allan Poe, and avant-garde ideas that would influence his work for years to come.

For musicians who perform Ravel today, his music presents special challenges.

"The hardest part about performing Ravel isn't the technical difficulty in a flashy way, but controlling all the different musical voices, each one distinct, and presenting them as a unified whole while creating different soundscapes," one pianist observes.

Ricardo Abapo, who has performed the demanding Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, describes the experience as "painting as you think about all these shades of colors... against somewhat mysterious thematic materials."

This painterly quality comes from Ravel's revolutionary way of using the orchestra. Instead of treating all the instruments as one big voice, he gave each one its own color and character. His famous Boléro shows this perfectly—one simple melody repeated over and over, but transformed each time by different instrumental combinations. It proves that you don't need complex melodies to create something stunning when you understand how to use color and texture.

Ravel's later years were marked by a cruel irony. A neurological condition gradually took away his ability to write music, even though his mind remained sharp and full of ideas. This makes his earlier works even more precious—each one represents not just inspiration, but inspiration carefully refined and polished. His friend, pianist Marguerite Long, understood this perfectly: "This great prisoner of perfection hid a sensitive and passionate soul."

One hundred fifty years after his birth, Ravel's music continues to challenge performers and delight audiences. As Zion Pe Montebon puts it, mastering "the art of impressionism... the French core of Ravel's music" takes years to truly understand. But that's precisely what makes his work so rewarding—it reveals new layers of meaning with each encounter.In this changing world where everything feels the need to rush, move, and adapt, his music offers something rare: undeniable proof that taking your time and doing it at your own pace to perfect your craft can result in something timeless and honest. His works serve as a reminder that sometimes, change and innovation do not necessarily require throwing away tradition, but rather finding new ways to make familiar things feel novel, genuine, and a one-of-a-kind experience.

Perhaps that is Ravel's unique gift as an artist. His craft demonstrates to people that the most exquisite art comes from pouring an open heart with real feelings and emotions. His music stands as testimony to what happens when one passionate heart works through disciplined hands, creating sounds that are both unmistakably French and universally moving.

In every perfectly crafted phrase, we hear the voice of a master who understood that sometimes the most profound emotions come not from wild expression, but from the patient, loving work of getting every detail exactly right.

Tickets for the upcoming Ravel Music Festival are now available on our events page. Don’t miss this special four-concert series celebrating the timeless works of Maurice Ravel — secure your seats today.