An Evening with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet
Tue, Nov 18, 2025, 7:00 pm
Alice Tully Hall
2 hours 30 minutes, including 2 intermissions
Maurice Ravel is one of the most creative, detailed, and skilled composers in history. In the French pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet we find talent in a similar vein: a musician of inexhaustible imagination, drive, and virtuosity. Bavouzet brings to CMS a great pianistic feat dedicated to Ravel’s complete published works for solo piano. This recital will go down in Lincoln Center history as a landmark artistic achievement.
Program
Maurice Ravel
(1875–1937)Sérénade grotesque for Piano
(c. 1893)Maurice Ravel
(1875–1937)Menuet antique for Piano
(1895)Maurice Ravel
(1875–1937)Pavane pour une infante défunte for Piano
(1899)Maurice Ravel
(1875–1937)Jeux d'eau for Piano
(1901)Maurice Ravel
(1875–1937)Sonatine for Piano
(1903-05)Maurice Ravel
(1875–1937)Miroirs for Piano
(1904–05)Maurice Ravel
(1875–1937)Gaspard de la nuit for Piano
(1908)Maurice Ravel
(1875–1937)Minuet sur le nom d'Haydn for Piano
(1909)Maurice Ravel
(1875–1937)Valses nobles et sentimentales for Piano
(1911-12)Maurice Ravel
(1875–1937)À la manière de Chabrier for Piano
(1912-13)Maurice Ravel
(1875–1937)À la manière de Borodine for Piano
(1912-13)Maurice Ravel
(1875–1937)Prélude for Piano
(1913)Maurice Ravel
(1875–1937)Le tombeau de Couperin for Piano
(1914-17)Jean-Efflam Bavouzet
Award-winning pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet enjoys a prolific recording and international concert career, with performances described as possessing “exquisite sensibilty, delivered with the most subtly varied, beautiful sound” (Seen and Heard Magazine). He has performed with the Cleveland, NHK Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, BBC Symphony and London Philharmonic orchestras, and has collaborated with many renowned conductors including Vladimir Jurowski, Gianandrea Noseda, Vasily Petrenko, Ludovic Morlot, Edward Gardner, and Louis Langrée.
Bavouzet’s recital schedule takes him across four continents in the 2025–26 season, with performances at major venues such as Sydney’s City Recital Hall, Kyoto Concert Hall, Beijing’s National Center for the Performing Arts, Seoul’s Kumho Arts Center, Stockholm’s Queen Silvia Concert Hall, the Glasshouse International Centre, Wiener Konzerthaus, and Lincoln Center. Orchestral collaborations include the Queensland, Trondheim, Aalborg, and Cincinnati Symphony Orchestras as well as Staatskapelle Weimar and others.
In recent seasons, he has appeared with the Philharmonia Orchestra (on an eight-concert tour of China, under Lan Shui), Philadelphia Orchestra, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Orchestre National de France, Shanghai, and the São Paulo, Adelaide, Sydney, Tokyo Metropolitan, and BBC Symphony Orchestras. He play-directed a three-concerto program with the Seattle Symphony and toured the Baltics with Manchester Camerata. He is a frequent guest at the Verbier and Bravo! Vail Music Festivals, and a regular recitalist at London’s Wigmore Hall.
Bavouzet’s recordings have garnered multiple Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine, Diapason d’Or, and Choc de l’Année awards. Recording exclusively on the Chandos label, his most recent release, Ravel: Complete Works for Solo Piano, was praised by Gramophone for its “seasoned mastery, stylish perception and caring commitment to [the] repertoire.” He performs the complete works of Ravel in recital at over twenty venues in Ravel’s 150th-anniversary year. Other notable recordings include the complete Haydn Piano Sonatas series, which was hailed by Gramophone as “a modern benchmark”; Pierre Sancan: A Musical Tribute with the BBC Philharmonic under Yan Pascal Tortelier; The Beethoven Connection, which earned multiple accolades from publications including the New York Times (following his much-lauded complete Beethoven Sonatas, and play-conducting Beethoven’s Piano Concertos with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra); the complete Mozart Piano Concertos with the Manchester Camerata under Gábor Takács-Nagy; and Bartók’s and Prokofiev’s complete Piano Concertos with the BBC Philharmonic under Gianandrea Noseda, the latter winning in the Concerto category at the 2014 Gramophone Awards.
Bavouzet has worked closely with Sir Georg Solti, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Zoltan Kocsis, György Kurtág, Maurice Ohana, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Bruno Mantovani, and Jörg Widmann, and is also a champion of lesser-known French music, notably that of Gabriel Pierné and Albéric Magnard. In 2012 he was the ICMA Artist of the Year, and in 2008 was awarded Beijing’s first ever Elite Prize for his Beethoven Sonatas series.
He is the International Visiting Artist in Keyboard Studies at the Royal Northern College of Music.