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If you enjoy familiar music played on non-traditional instruments (as I do), this album will delight and surprise you. Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, maybe my favorite piece of music, translates remarkably well to saxophone quartet. The Rameau transcriptions are similarly effective. Urquiza’s works employ extended techniques to create startling and often amusing sounds. The Pérez-Villegas brings us back toward Ravel’s elegant sound world – with a touch of the blues for good measure!

Jan WellerHost

Kebyart is a Spanish saxophone quartet currently celebrating its tenth anniversary season. To mark the Ravel’s 150th anniversary, Kebyart sets out to explore his unique compositional legacy, despite the composer never having written for saxophone quartet. The album includes Kebyart’s transcriptions of Le Tombeau de Couperin and Pavane pour une infante défunte, alongside arrangements of French Baroque works by Rameau, highlighting both Ravel’s admiration for ornamentation and his influence on today’s composers. New pieces by Mikel Urquiza and Joan Pérez-Villegas engage with Ravel’s musical philosophy, delving into his radical simplicity, subtle rhythmic layers and inventive structures. Through these works, Kebyart aims to unravel Ravel’s complex yet elegant style, blending the past with the future in a journey of musical discovery.

Kebyart reflects that “[Ravel’s] music is a leaf: a thing of innocent beauty and miraculous architecture. But it is also a tree: from its roots, embedded in a rich subsoil, new shoots filled with a magical sap grow up towards the sky – towards the future.”

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