Pavane pour une Infante defunte       

Maurice Ravel is one of the most underrated of all mainstream composers. Educated at the Paris Conservatoire, his career was limited by the onset of World War One and him developing Pick’s disease, a malfunction of the brain, which led to his relatively early death. His piano music is fantastic and loved by all great players. His Pavane for a dead child is almost as well known as Boler0.

Pavanes were written in the 16th Century especially in Italy and Spain, and even England as a sort of courtly dance. Much of Ravel’s music seems to refer back this bygone age (of Lully, Rameau and Couperin). It isn’t a funereal lamentation for a child who had just died, but rather a dance that could have taken place in in years gone by a small princess at a Spanish court. In 1910 the work was arranged for a small orchestra.