The Cambridge Companion to Ravel: Cambridge Companions to Music Paperback – Illustrated, 21 Aug. 2008

This is an excellent book that presents many different topics regarding Ravel's music with specific musical examples to illustrate many of the points raised. Each chapter is easy to read as it is divided into various sections with sub-headings; this also makes it easier to find something specific if needed. The book is also divided into three main sections: 'Culture and aesthetic', 'Musical Explorations' and 'Performance and reception' which provides a good framework and allows the reader to read about a specific area from a few different viewpoints. This is definately one of the best all-round books on Ravel that I have come across and I recommend it to anyone interested in Ravel and his music.

Well, Santa brought me a 'Complete Edition' Ravel boxset for Christmas, and having previously only known 'Bolero', I found myself swimming in about 17 CDs of pure Ravel and not really knowing what to make of it all - so I decided to get a copy of this book.A good choice? - well, it turns out that this is a not really a book for the complete layman. Indeed, I would say it's more of an undergraduate level text - and I must confess it's technical discussions of functional harmony and suchlike go way beyond what I could understand.Each chapter is written by a different academic; some are more discursive of Ravel's cultural relevance, some are very focussed on music theory. There's a lot of score extract examples, but not being much of a sight-reader, I often struggled to follow these.If you're looking for a chatty biographical style book which a gazateer of Ravel's works, I think like me, you'll find this book rather daunting. The chapters at the end discussing contemporary critical reactions to Ravel's music and gramophone recordings made in his lifetime were probably the highlight for me. If you've done A-level music or are studying music at university I suspect you'd find this book a very useful text.

Not ideal for the ordinary music lover, since it contains some pretty heavy duty material on the music. However, that's what it intended to do, and what it does is authoritative.