If Ravel’s Boléro makes you yawn, you’re not really listening

Only boring people are bored by Ravel’s Boléro. True, the composer – the slyest of wits – left his share of booby traps for the uncomprehending; take his comment, in a letter to Paul Dukas, that ‘I have written only one masterpiece, Boléro. Unfortunately there is no music in it.’ Yet Ravel was a sublime colourist; a master of the instrumental palette who makes Stravinsky’s orchestration sound coarse by comparison, and Boléro is one long twist of a fabulous kaleidoscope. Even its notorious repetitions are a red herring. Take the full score as a whole and you’ll struggle to find two bars that are identical (there are a couple at the start and a couple near the very end, but that’s basically it). If Boléro makes you yawn, you’re either tired of orchestral sound tout court, or you’re not really listening.

John Wilson and the Sinfonia of London were determined to make us listen. Ravel’s opening dynamic is pianissimo, but Wilson took it several notches below that; the snare-drum barely a heartbeat and the first flute solo as weightless as smoke. A brave move in the boxy acoustic of the Barbican, but it came off, and the silence from the audience was intense. Wilson handpicks his players for a reason: he knows exactly how far he can ask them to go, and so he was able to let colour build upon increasingly psychedelic colour. E flat clarinet over low flutes. Oboe d’amore uncoiling above shrill, pecking bassoons. Sopranino sax squealing juicily to a trumpet tattoo; piccolos and celeste shrouding the horn melody in weird polytonal bioluminescence.