The 10 best pieces of music by Ravel

5 March 2025, 16:25 | Updated: 7 March 2025, 12:04

On his 150th anniversary, we pick our ten favourite pieces by French composer, Maurice Ravel.

Maurice Ravel is one of the greatest French composers who ever lived. Along with Claude Debussy, he single-handedly changed the direction of French music in the early 20th century, leading to the impressionist movement – the musical equivalent of Claude Monet’s paintings.

Today, he is best known for his hugely successful work, Boléro, which has earned a permanent place in popular culture over the last century. The ice-dancing pair Torvill and Dean used it in the 1984 Winter Olympics, where they won the gold medal.

However, Ravel’s catalogue encompasses 85 works in a wide variety of styles, including several piano works, two operas, and numerous concertos and chamber works.

Here are our favourites...

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1. Mother Goose

   Ma mère l’Oye (Mother Goose) was originally written as a five-movement piano duet in 1910. However, Ravel was a master orchestrator with a gift for scoring melodies, giving the music new life and colour. The orchestral version, completed in 1911, is best known today.

   The final movement Le jardin féerique (The Fairy Garden), is particularly moving, with the bells chiming represented perfectly by two horns, leading to a sparkling conclusion.

   Read more: 10 of the greatest 'wow' moments in classical music

   

   Ravel: Ma mère l'oye / Dudamel · Berliner Philharmoniker

2. Piano Concerto in G major

   Ravel was a brilliant pianist, so naturally, he wrote for his main instrument. One of the most enjoyable of all his compositions is the lively Piano Concerto in G major, which includes one of the most drop-dead-gorgeous slow movements ever penned. It also included strong influences from jazz music, which Ravel was increasingly becoming interested in around the time of the composition in 1931. The jazz scene was booming in Paris around this time, and Ravel even became a friend and close admirer of Geroge Gershwin.

   He wrote, “Personally I find jazz most interesting: the rhythms, the way the melodies are handled, the melodies themselves. I have heard some of George Gershwin’s works, and I find them intriguing.”

   

   Martha Argerich: Ravel - Piano Concerto in G Major | Nobel Prize Concert 2009

3. La Valse

   Ravel’s remarkable virtuosity led him to create pieces in many different genres. Between 1919 and 1920, he turned his attention to the waltz, the form made famous by the Strauss family, particularly Johann Strauss II. His interest in composing a waltz spanned 10 years earlier, and he completed a precursor to La Valse in 1911.

   La Valse is a mesmerising portrait of the beauty of the ballroom dance. As ever, Ravel’s orchestration brings the colours vividly to life, adding sparkle to every phrase.

   He describes the scene with the following preface in the score: “Through whirling clouds, waltzing couples may be faintly distinguished. The clouds gradually scatter: one sees at letter A an immense hall peopled with a whirling crowd. The scene is gradually illuminated. The light of the chandeliers bursts forth at the fortissimo letter B.”

   

   Ravel : La Valse (Orchestre philharmonique de Radio France / Mikko Franck)

4. Daphnis et Chloé

   Originally conceived as a ballet commissioned by the legendary Sergei Diaghilev in 1909 for his Ballet Russes, Daphnis et Chloé features Ravel at his sumptuous best. Its luscious harmonies, orchestration (which includes a vast array of percussion) and passionate bursts of melody are extraordinary and are seen as a cornerstone of the impressionist movement.

   

   Ravel // Daphnis et Chloé Suite No 2 | Sir Simon Rattle

5. Tzigane

   Described by the composer as “a virtuoso piece in the style of a Hungarian rhapsody” Tzigane has a sound world akin to Brahms’ Hungarian Rhapsodies. It was originally composed for solo violin and piano and was later orchestrated for solo violin and orchestra. It is a real tour de force for the violinist, who has to have mastered their instrument to perform it.

   

   Ravel - Tzigane | Maxim Vengerov

6. Pavane pour une infante défunte

   Written in 1899 while the French composer was studying at the Conservatoire de Paris, this gorgeous piece is very much a homage to Ravel’s teacher Gabriel Fauré, which was written ten years previously. Its relative simplicity contrasts with Ravel’s more impressionistic compositions and is a deliberate pastiche of the Pavane – a slow processional dance popular in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries.

   It was originally written for piano, but as is the way with Ravel, its orchestrated version is the one most commonly played, opening with a mournful horn solo.

   

   RAVEL Pavane pour une infante défunte, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen

7. Le Tombeau de Couperin

   Composed between 1914 and 1917, right in the middle of the First World War, this intimate composition is based on the traditional Baroque form of a tombeau. Ravel dedicated each movement to the memory of a friend who had died fighting in the conflict. As ever, Ravel’s ability to adapt his writing style is evident through the expertly notated ornamentation throughout the piece.

   

   Maurice Ravel: "Le Tombeau de Couperin" mit Paavo Järvi | NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester

8. Miroirs

   This five-movement suite for solo piano was written as a dedication to members of “Les Apaches” – who were artistic rebels who referred to themselves as “hooligans”, living in the Parisian suburbs of the Belle Epoque – and is full of rich harmonies, chromatic melodies and scrunchy chords. Quintessential Ravel.

   

   Jaeden Izik-Dzurko performs Ravel's Une barque sur l'océan at the Fondation Louis Vuitton

9. String Quartet

   Written in 1903 when the composer was 28, this beautiful piece is modelled on Debussy’s string quartet, written ten years previously, although Ravel’s musical ideas are very distinct from that of his older impressionist compatriot.

   It’s a highly lyrical piece written in the traditional four-movement structure of a quartet and has become a staple of the string quartet repertoire.

   

   Maurice Ravel: String Quartet in F major

10. Boléro

    No list would be complete without Ravel’s most recognisable piece, Boléro. Written in 1928, it was one of the last pieces he completed before illness affected his ability to compose. It is remarkable for its use of just one melody, which is passed across the orchestra 17 times, tarting tentatively with a solo flute and ending with the full orchestra, which brings us home with a tremendous crash of full-blooded orchestral majesty.

    Read more: Ravel was the only composer of ‘Boléro’, court rules after six-year co-writer dispute

    

    Maurice Ravel - Bolero | Alondra de la Parra | WDR Sinfonieorchester