Description
After exploring ideas from classical music on their last album The Chamber Music Effect, the innovative trio Vein continues to resolutely pursue this path with their latest production Vein plays Ravel – a collection of compositions by French composer Maurice Ravel.
Maurice Ravel was an obvious choice for Vein. Although the composer and arguably one of the most enigmatic figures of classical music lived over 100 years ago, his compositions share a lot of common ground with Vein’s soundscape.
Ravel lived in an era during which representational tradition transitioned into abstract modernity. The Swiss trio finds itself in a similar situation: breaking new ground with its music without rejecting the traditional values of jazz. Likewise, Ravel helped himself to many styles of music for his compositions, including baroque, Spanish music and jazz. Vein’s influences are similarly multifaceted. The underlying idea of Vein plays Ravel was to use selected pieces by Maurice Ravel as a template, translate them into Vein-esque musical language and thereby repeat Ravel’s approach some 100 years later.
Vein chose entirely different compositions for which Maurice Ravel used various stylistic models: Three pieces from the suite Le Tombeau de Couperin and Mouvement de Menuet from sonatina for piano, in which Ravel refers to baroque music. Or the Blues taken from the violin sonata and the 5 o’clock Foxtrot from the opera L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, for which Ravel used sounds from jazz and the salon music of the time.
