Search - The Great Composers: Maurice Ravel on DVD

JOHN maurice ravel

Jeffery Mingo | Homewood, IL USA | 08/29/2007

(3 out of 5 stars)

"The narrator's very first sentence is "Little is known about Ravel's personal life." The first dance seems to reference that Ravel patronized evening women, as some accounts suggest. The more prevalent theory, that Ravel had a nature in common with other Frenchmen such as Michel Foucault and Jean-Paul Gaultier, does not really come up. A dancer portraying Ravel dances with another man, but the moves between the two are aggressive, rather than affectionate.

A lot of the dancing looked like voguing, when it was meant to portray flamenco. You would have thought Willi Ninja did the choreography, rather than a Joaquin Cortez.
Because I love Ravel's "Pavane for a Dead Princess," I would have preferred to see a dance using that song, rather than the incredible song just playing in the background of the narration. This work has an anachronistic feel as the string quartet is too diverse and dressed too sexily to have been a quartet from the nineteenth century."