Maurice Ravel: Orchestral Works, Sinfonia of London / John Wilson

Sinfonia of London and John Wilson’s all-Ravel disc for Chandos, recorded at St Augustine’s Church, Kilburn, and released in 2022, took that year’s Gramophone Spatial Audio Award, a category built specifically for recordings made with immersive, multichannel listening in mind rather than as an afterthought bolted onto a conventional stereo mix. The disc was issued as a Hybrid SACD carrying both stereo and multichannel layers, and is also available in Dolby Atmos through streaming platforms that support it.

The programme itself sticks to firmly canonical Ravel: the complete ballet score of Ma mère l’Oye (Mother Goose), Boléro, the Valses nobles et sentimentales, the Pavane pour une infante défunte, Alborada del gracioso, and La valse. None of it is rare repertoire, all six pieces are among the most recorded orchestral works in the French catalogue, which puts the emphasis squarely on how the performance and the recording itself handle music built almost entirely out of colour and texture. Ravel’s orchestration is exact and transparent by design; a surround or object-based mix has an unusual amount to work with in a way that denser, more contrapuntally busy repertoire doesn’t offer as readily.

About Sinfonia of London and John Wilson

Sinfonia of London isn’t a historic ensemble with an unbroken performing history, the name belongs to a freelance orchestra active mainly on film and studio sessions in the mid-20th century, revived by the conductor John Wilson in 2018 and rebuilt from London’s pool of top orchestral and session players. Since then, Wilson and the orchestra have built a substantial Chandos discography centred on richly orchestrated 20th-century repertoire, Respighi, Korngold, Rachmaninov, and several volumes of French orchestral music including this one. The ensemble’s specific origin as a hand-picked, non-standing orchestra plays into recordings like this: the personnel is drawn from players used to the exacting demands of studio and session work, which suits repertoire where every orchestral line needs to read clearly on record.

About the format

Spatial and immersive audio remain a minority format for most classical listeners, who still mostly hear recordings in ordinary two-channel stereo through headphones or a conventional hi-fi setup. Gramophone’s decision to create a dedicated award category for it reflects a real shift in how some labels, Chandos among the more committed, are now approaching new orchestral recordings: mixing and sometimes remastering with genuinely multichannel or object-based playback in mind from the outset, rather than treating surround sound as a niche afterthought for audiophile downloads only.

About the programme

The six pieces span roughly three decades of Ravel’s composing life, from the early Pavane pour une infante défunte (1899) through to Boléro (1928), one of the last major orchestral works he completed. Ma mère l’Oye began life as a four-hand piano suite written for two children of friends of the composer, before Ravel orchestrated and expanded it into a full ballet score, it’s among the gentlest, most transparently scored music in his output, built from fairy-tale movements rather than the more overtly virtuosic writing found elsewhere on the disc. La valse, by contrast, is often read as a darker, more unsettled piece, a “choreographic poem” that takes the Viennese waltz and pushes it toward disintegration, written in the shadow of the First World War. Programming both alongside Boléro’s single, obsessively repeated rhythmic idea and orchestral crescendo gives the disc a genuine range of Ravel’s orchestral personality rather than settling for a single mood across the whole programme.

A note on this page

This is a newly written review of a real, current recording rather than a page recovered from mmmusic’s original 1991–2018 archive, the shop closed before this disc was ever released. We’ve written it fresh, from verified facts about the recording, its performers, and the award it won, to extend the same kind of coverage the original site gave to classical releases in its own day.