Ravel, Jorge Bolet's Terrifying Scarbo!
Jorge sometimes played Le Tombeau de Couperin by Ravel in his recitals, but he never played it with the fugue. Jorge did not like the fugue and even believed it did not fit in to the cycle.
About Ravel I can share with you this story.
At one of the masterclasses in Edinburgh, a student was struggling with Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit. As always when a student was struggling with the music, Jorge would sit down at the piano and play it himself to show his intentions.I
Almost unbelievably, he played great parts of Ondine and Le Gibet, and concluded with an almost complete Scarbo. His Scarbo was so frighteningly thunderous at times that the Bechstein was shaking on its legs. I remember everybody in the room, including myself, being in shock when he finished and then there was a long silence. Jorge had taken everybody's breath away. After the long silence the struggling student took his score from the piano and walked to his seat. Jorge broke the silence by telling he never played the work in his recitals and then enjoyed his cigarette.
Mattheus Smits
There are also - intriguingly - a couple of performances of Ravel'‘s piano Concerto in G major by Jorge. He probably - even if intermittently - played as much music by the two Impressionists Ravel & Debussy as Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli!
27 February 1975
Braunschweig, West Germany (Radio Broadcast )
Ravel: Piano Concerto in G major
Norddeutsche Rundfunks Sinfonieorchester / Heinz Wallberg
13 April 1975
Ravel: Piano Concerto in G major
Liszt: Hungarian Fantasy
Reading Symph. Orch. (Berks County, Pennsylvania) under Louis Vyner (1907-1981), who had conducted Jorge in the early 1930s
Sylvan Levin (1903-1996), a friend of Jorge, appeared several times as a pianist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, notably playing the American premiere of Ravel's Piano Concerto in G with the orchestra in 1932 under the baton of Stokowski.
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