The Nash Ensemble
(Onyx)
The chamber group’s all-Ravel CD is an impeccable farewell to its much-missed founder
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his all-Ravel recording by the Nash Ensemble was the final project of Amelia Freedman’s extraordinary 60 years as artistic director, and it’s a fitting farewell to the group’s much-missed founder, who died in July. It includes all three larger chamber works plus the composer’s own two-piano arrangement of his orchestral masterpiece La Valse: Alasdair Beatson and Simon Crawford-Phillips are a polished team in this, sounding wonderfully louche early on and then dispatching fistfuls of notes and long glissandos with seeming ease, all while catching the music’s increasingly sinister nature.
