“This is one of the most sheerly beautiful pieces ever written, and probably the ne plus ultra of how you can make an orchestra sound.” Simon Rattle is talking about the Suite No. 2 from Ravel’s ballet Daphnis et Chloé, featured on the conductor’s new EP release with the London Symphony Orchestra. Ballets have plotlines, of course, but in the case of Daphnis it’s Ravel’s rapturous music which Rattle thinks really matters. “The story you almost don’t need to know anything about—it’s flimsy beyond belief,” he comments. “But what it starts with is the most magical evocation of a sunrise, with birdsong and the gradual overwhelming warmth of the sun rising.” Ravel depicts these scenes, Rattle continues, in orchestration of a remarkably high quality. “One of the secrets about Ravel is that he puts things together like a mosaic. When you hear this extraordinary wash of sound, it’s actually made up of lots of tiny, very precise distillations. There’s nothing left to chance at all.” A forensic knowledge of how individual instruments sound, and what they are capable of expressing, is also vital for creating Ravel’s hyper-sensitive soundworld. “He knew so much about the possibilities of every instrument,” Rattle explains. “In fact, somebody wrote a whole book simply about what to play, on what string, in all of Ravel’s pieces, because it’s so complicated. And in Daphnis et Chloé, he takes almost every instrument to absolutely the limits of its ability, while never completely losing it.” Rattle cites the concluding “Danse générale” as a prime example of Ravel’s meticulous attention to detail. “It took Ravel nearly a year to complete, because it was done in such fine detail. But in fact, it is one of the most overwhelming rhythmic experiences in all of music. It is incredibly wild music, written by a deeply controlled person.” Rattle’s relationship with Daphnis et Chloé goes back a long way, to his teenage years in Liverpool, and he has conducted the ballet many times. The London Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Suite No. 2, Rattle feels, typifies the highly sophisticated way in which the LSO performs French music. “The minute you put a piece of French music in front of them, the sound of the orchestra suddenly transforms into this magic thing,” he says. “There is an instinct for what to do.” Apple’s Spatial Audio technology has been used to capture the performance, and the conductor is in no doubt about the potential it offers to take orchestral recordings to a whole new level. “The changes in technology have been absolutely extraordinary over my lifetime. The recordings I bought with my pocket money when I was eight or nine would seem almost unlistenable now,” he comments. “So it’s fascinating to know there is this new technology that can bring you almost inside the orchestra, where you can hear the music better and better, and more and more. Then people are getting the idea of what an orchestra actually sounds like, rather than the slightly boxed, squeezed-up version that we had formerly. And this is an enormous difference.”