Piano Greats: Jean Efflam-Bavouzet
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Maurice Ravel was born in the deep south of France: the Pays Basque, on the border with Spain, and throughout his life he liked to retreat there. He was a polite, impeccably dressed man, and he took painstaking care over every last note of his music, but he did it his own way. As a young man he joined the radical group of artists who called themselves Les Apaches – “the hooligans” – and quickly became so famous that when the jury of France’s biggest music prize, the Prix de Rome, refused to let him win, it caused a national scandal. The newspapers called it “l’affaire Ravel”.
Yet in person he was quiet and outwardly reserved. Ravel always loved small, beautiful things, and in later life he lived alone in a tiny house at Montfort-L’Amaury near Paris, filled with delicate ornaments and ingenious mechanical toys. “I am seeing no-one but my frogs, my shepherdesses and my other insects” he wrote to one friend. Of course, the house also contained a piano; throughout his life, it was the principal tool of his trade and he told Ralph Vaughan Williams – his favourite pupil and a lifelong friend – that “without a piano I could not invent new harmonies”.
Throughout his piano music, Ravel shows an almost magical aptitude for taking old things – musical forms, childhood memories, romantic poetry – and making them his own, timeless yet wholly new. So today we hear him lovingly reinventing the musical language of favourite composers (Haydn, Borodin, Chabrier), or capturing the spirit of another place and time in his own way and on his own terms, whether old Vienna (Valses nobles et sentimentales) or the Spain of Velázquez’s royal portraits (Pavane pour une infante défunte). There are musical equivalents of his beloved toys and ornaments (Sérénade grotesque, Menuet antique); ravishing impressionist miniatures (Miroirs) and a very personal kind of classicism (Sonatine).
Above all, there’s the dazzling, dark-hued homage to French romantic literature (Gaspard de la nuit) and the lovely, haunted Tombeau de Couperin – outwardly a graceful salute to the French baroque: inwardly a heartfelt epitaph to friends who had fallen in the Great War. Art, for Ravel, transfigured and intensified human feeling; the more beautiful its surface, the more passionate the emotions that coursed beneath its skin. Some described his music as artificial. “Does it never occur to them”, he remarked, “that one can be artificial by nature?”.
Jean Efflam-Bavouzet
Award-winning pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet enjoys a prolific recording and international concert career, with performances described as possessing “exquisite sensibilité, delivered with the most subtly varied, beautiful sound” (Seen and Heard Magazine). He has performed with The Cleveland, NHK Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, BBC Symphony and London Philharmonic orchestras to name a few, and has collaborated with many renowned conductors including Vladimir Jurowski, Gianandrea Noseda, Vasily Petrenko, Ludovic Morlot, Edward Gardner and Louis Langrée.
Bavouzet’s recital schedule takes him across four continents in the 2025/26 season, with performances at major venues such as Sydney’s City Recital Hall, Kyoto Concert Hall, Beijing’s National Centre for the Performing Arts, Seoul’s Kumho Arts Center, Stockholm’s Queen Silvia Concert Hall, the Glasshouse International Centre, Wiener Konzerthaus and Lincoln Center New York. Orchestral collaborations include Queensland, Trondheim, Aalborg and Cincinnati Symphony Orchestras as well as Staatskapelle Weimar inter alia.
In recent seasons, Bavouzet has appeared with Philharmonia Orchestra (on an eight-concert tour of China, under Lan Shui), Philadelphia Orchestra, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Orchestre National de France, Shanghai, São Paulo, Adelaide, Sydney, Tokyo Metropolitan and BBC Symphony Orchestras, play-directed a three-concerto programme with Seattle Symphony and toured the Baltics with Manchester Camerata. Bavouzet is a frequent guest at Verbier and Bravo! Vail Music Festivals, and a regular recitalist at London’s Wigmore Hall.
Bavouzet’s recordings have garnered multiple Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine, Diapason d’Or and Choc de l’Année awards. Recording exclusively on the Chandos label, his most recent release, Ravel: Complete Works for Solo Piano, was praised by Gramophone Magazine for its “seasoned mastery, stylish perception and caring commitment to [the] repertoire.” He performs the complete works of Ravel in recital at over twenty venues in the 2025 150th anniversary year. Other notable recordings include the complete Haydn Piano Sonatas series, which was hailed by Gramophone as “a modern benchmark”; “Pierre Sancan: A Musical Tribute” with the BBC Philharmonic under Yan Pascal Tortelier; “The Beethoven Connection”, which earned multiple accolades from publications including The New York Times (following on from his much-lauded complete Beethoven Sonatas, and play-conducted Beethoven Piano Concertos with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra); the complete Mozart Piano Concertos with the Manchester Camerata under Gábor Takács-Nagy; and Bartók’s and Prokofiev’s complete Piano Concertos with the BBC Philharmonic under Gianandrea Noseda, the latter winning in the Concerto category at the 2014 Gramophone Awards.
Bavouzet has worked closely with Sir Georg Solti, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Zoltan Kocsis, György Kurtág, Maurice Ohana, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Bruno Mantovani and Jörg Widmann and is also a champion of lesser-known French music, notably that of Gabriel Pierné and Albéric Magnard. In 2012 he was ICMA Artist of the Year, and in 2008 was awarded Beijing’s first ever Elite Prize for his Beethoven complete sonata series.
He is the International Visiting Artist in Keyboard Studies at the Royal Northern College of Music.
