STORY AND PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK

Sun Valley Music Festival’s Artistic Director Alasdair Neale was 9 when his parents bought a 45 RPM record boasting a composition by Maurice Ravel.

“Eventually it wore out we played it so many times,” he said. “It was the first time I heard some form of ecstasy, which is something I’ve heard often since.”

The Sun Valley Music Festival will pay homage to Ravel tonight—Aug. 10—on the occasion of the composer’s 150th birthday.

The concert will begin at 6:30 p.m. tonight at the Sun Valley Pavilion with a pre-concert lecture led by Peter Henderson at 5:45 p.m. at the Lawn Paver Bar. DJ BearSkinRug, aka Ernie Trevino, will lead a Lawn Party following the concert.

Neale painted a portrait of Ravel before a full house in the lecture room of The Community Library on Thursday.

Ravel was born in the Basque country of France, he said. His mother was Basque, although she had been raised in Madrid. His Swiss-French father was a successful engineer and inventor who came up with an early internal combustion engine and a circus machine known as the “Whirlwind of Death.”

The family moved to Paris when Ravel was three months to a building within a six-minute walk from Neale’s Paris apartment.

“It’s near where I walk every day to get my baguette,” Neale said.

Ravel started learning piano at 7 and music theory at 12. He then enrolled in a very conservative conservatory choir from which he was expelled for not applying himself.

He was a good pianist but not a virtuoso, Neale said. But he did know his way around a piano, which led to some of his exquisite compositions. In fact, his piano music is considered among the most exciting, colorful and challenging musicians can face.

Told he was too old for the Air Force, Ravel volunteered as an ambulance driver when World War I broke out and soon found himself driving munitions under German bombardment As the war was winding down in 1917, his mother died and he sank into a despair and depression from which he never quite recovered.

He toured the United States in 1928, writing his famous “Bolero” during that time. He not only visited the Grand Canyon but fell in love with the jazz clubs of Harlem.

By the 1930s he was exhibiting symptoms that today might be recognized as dementia. In 1932 he suffered a head injury in a taxi accident, which may have exacerbated his existing cerebral condition. His output slowed after the accident but the quality of his compositions did not seem to suffer.

He underwent an operation in 1937 as the pain grew. And, though he experienced short-lived improvement, he soon lapsed into a coma from which he never awoke. He died three days after Christmas at 62 years of age.

Though he was known as a dandy, he never married.

“Who knows what passions lie beneath the silk vest of Maurice Ravel,” Neale said, quoting one of Ravel’s contemporaries.

Ravel was his own critic-he knew when one of his pieces needed revising, Neale said. He didn’t pay attention to critics, whether they served up good reviews or bad.

His pieces “exhibit incredible harmony, a delicious harmonic palette only Ravel is capable of,” Neale added.

Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit,” which he wrote in 1908, is among the most difficult pieces to play that there is—“a nasty piece of work,” said Neale, imitating the staccato-type notes. In fact, Ravel purposely intended the Scarbo movement to be more difficult than Balakirev’s Islamey.

It requires repeated notes in both hands and double-note scales in the right hand.

Ravel was also an extraordinary master of the harp, understanding all of its possibilities, Neale said.

He found humor in operas. His “L’efant et les Sortileges” features a boxing/dancing duet between a Chinese cup and a Wedgewood teapot as a naughty child is punished for his bad behavior, the items in his room coming to life.

His “Miroirs,” or “The Valley of the Bells,” which the Sun Valley Music Festival will play tonight, evokes four different bell sounds, including the marimba and handbells. Coupled with the sensual use of strings, you get the feeling you’re gliding above a valley with bells underneath, said Neale. Even the piano is played with percussionist using mallet.

Following another slice from “Miroirs”—The Jester’s Morning Song—the orchestra will perform Neale’s personal favorite. That is “Valses nobles et sentimentales.” It features seven short waltzes in different forms, the piece taking place in empty barroom after emptied. Waltzes move from slow to fast, with one prefiguring the manic energy Ravel will display in some of his later writing.

The final piece the orchestra will showcase is Suite No. 2 from Daphnis et Chloe, which will be conducted by Stephanie Childress. It begins with “a most wonderful sunrise,” offering audiences the chance to imagine the rustling of brush with the first ray of sun coming over the horizon, said Neale.

It took a long time to write, did not have the best premiere, and it was overshadowed a year later by Tchaikovsky’s Rite of Spring. But it went on to become a cherished orchestral work.

“The climax of the sun is a sonic tsunami,” said Neale.

Ravel was not an iconoclast. Nor was he revolutionary like Beethoven or Tchaikovsky, Neale said.

“Perhaps you could say he was an alchemist—he could conjure up in the imagination places we’d never been.”

Harmonics was incredibly important to him—he knew his craft and how to conjure up the sounds in his imagination,” Neale added.

“He had an emotional connection when at his greatest, touching on something primal in us.”

Alasdair Neale will conduct three pieces of Maurice Ravel’s tonight and Stephanie Childrss, one.