Ravel: The Complete Solo Piano Works, Seong-Jin Cho, piano

Released in January 2025 to mark the 150th anniversary of Maurice Ravel’s birth, Seong-Jin Cho’s The Complete Solo Piano Works gathers every piece Ravel wrote for solo piano into a single chronological sequence, from the early Sérénade grotesque and Menuet antique through to Le Tombeau de Couperin, his 1917 memorial suite for friends lost in the First World War. It’s the first instalment of a larger Deutsche Grammophon project built around Cho for the anniversary year: a companion recording of both piano concertos, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Andris Nelsons, followed the next month. The solo set earned Cho the Instrumentalist of the Year prize at the 2025 Opus Klassik Awards, one of Germany’s most prominent classical honours.

About the programme

Hearing Ravel’s solo piano output in strict chronological order rather than a curated recital sequence makes the arc of his development unusually legible: the light, salon-adjacent Menuet antique and Pavane pour une infante défunte give way to the water-painting textures of Jeux d’eau, the more structurally ambitious Sonatine and Miroirs, and then to Gaspard de la nuit, widely regarded as one of the most technically demanding works in the entire piano repertoire, inspired by Aloysius Bertrand’s macabre prose poems. The set continues through the Valses nobles et sentimentales and closes with Le Tombeau de Couperin, a suite that looks backward to 18th-century French keyboard forms even as each of its movements is dedicated to a specific friend killed in the war, Ravel’s most direct engagement with personal loss in the solo piano catalogue. Presenting the whole output as one continuous chronological document, rather than mixing early and late works for programme variety, is itself an editorial choice that treats the recording as a reference document as much as a recital.

Gaspard de la nuit alone illustrates why this is treated as a landmark of the repertoire rather than just another virtuoso showpiece: its three movements, “Ondine,” a water-spirit’s seduction rendered in constant rippling figuration; “Le Gibet,” a slow, static tolling built around a single repeated bell-note that barely varies for pages at a time; and “Scarbo,” a nightmarish goblin scherzo whose rapid repeated notes and hand-crossing leaps are frequently cited among the hardest passages in the standard piano literature, demand three almost opposite kinds of pianistic control within a single 20-minute work. Programming it as one stop along a strict chronological survey, rather than as a recital’s dramatic centrepiece, asks a pianist to treat its extremity as part of a continuous developmental line rather than an isolated showpiece.

About the performer

Seong-Jin Cho’s international career effectively began with his gold medal at the 2015 Chopin Competition in Warsaw, one of the most closely watched events in the piano world, and he has recorded exclusively for Deutsche Grammophon since. A complete-works project of this scale, timed precisely to a major anniversary and paired with a second concerto recording released weeks later, represents a significant institutional investment from the label in a single artist’s interpretation of one composer, the kind of undertaking usually reserved for pianists with an already well-established reputation in the relevant repertoire. It also invites direct comparison with the handful of earlier pianists, among them Pascal Rogé, Vlado Perlemuter and Louis Lortie, who have recorded Ravel’s solo output as a complete cycle rather than a selective recital, a lineage this set now joins.

A note on this page

This page is new writing about a genuinely current recording, not part of the archive recovered from mmmusic’s original 1991–2018 run, the shop had long since closed by the time this project was announced. It’s fresh coverage, built from verified facts about the release and its reception, extending the same factual approach to new records as they actually appear.