A tireless search for perfection

Jean-Efflam Bavouzet is in awe of Ravel's "infallible sense of proportion". Photo / Paul Mitchell

Pianist says he bonds with composer over their shared nationality and musical heritage

Jean-Efflam Bavouzet has a sharp sense of humour. Catching up with the French pianist before next week's concerto performance with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra and his Auckland Museum recital, he pauses when I ask him what he has heard about New Zealand. "You are really challenging me now," he says, but soon focuses on "the usual things that people talk about; your incredible nature, good food and your interesting wooden architecture down there".

It's an unexpected architectural reference, but later he will provide musical connections.

Maurice Ravel is the featured composer on this trip; Bavouzet gives us the G major Concerto on Thursday and the Sonatine and Miroirs balance Beethoven in Saturday's solo concert.

"Ravel is a composer I've always felt close to," he confides. "In fact, he's one of the two who always make me feel French when I listen to their music." The other, surprisingly, is Brahms. "Don't get me wrong, I adore Brahms," he insists. "But his symphonic works make you realise just how different French and German sensibilities can be."

Ravel has been very much on his mind, with a performance of this same concerto coming up at the BBC Proms, with conductor Nicholas Collon. He admits he enjoys the "essential paradox" of the Frenchman's music, "being extremely delicate and extremely powerful at the same time. Ravel can be so joyful, too, yet there's also a layer of melancholy there.

"He was a very refined and elegant composer who was such an ardent smoker that he almost cancelled an American tour when he realised he couldn't buy his favourite brand of cigarettes over there."

Most of all, Bavouzet admires Ravel's search for perfection. "It all comes from an infallible sense of proportion," he says. "In that respect he's very French, because this is a hallmark of our nation's sensibilities, especially when it comes to architecture."

He admires the fact that Ravel destroyed any work he wasn't happy with. "That is why he is one of the few composers who has all of his music in the repertoire, on concert stages worldwide."

Bavouzet is politic when it comes to naming his favourite concerto. "It is always the one I am playing at the time", and Ravel, he warns, is "not as easy as it seems".

He notes how this fastidious composer hated performers who put themselves too forcibly between his music and the audience. "Yet he asks you so many times to play 'expressively', which brings up certain challenges. The pianist has to do so but always within a framework that is almost classical in the Mozartian sense."

Talking classical, Bavouzet is thrilled to include two Beethoven Sonatas - Opus 90 and Opus 101 - in his Saturday recital, works he has just recorded as part of his ongoing Beethoven cycle with Chandos Records. "They are endlessly fascinating. Beethoven was always searching for new possibilities. He likes novelty and no two sonatas fit into the same mould. Yet when you play all 32 connections do come through."

Finally, who could resist asking a piano man's preference between Thursday's Steinway and Saturday's Fazioli?

"No way, unless I see the instrument," he says, laughing. "Steinway and Fazioli produce some wonderful pianos but it's not the same as a car brand. All Audis may be the same, but they're not musical instruments."

What: Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra
Where and when: Auckland Town Hall, Thursday, August 20 at 8pm

What: Jean-Efflam Bavouzet in recital
Where and when: Auckland Museum Auditorium, Saturday, August 22 at 8pm