It’s not the Ravel or Rimsky-Korsakov that make this double album and essential, but Walter Boudreau’s breathtaking Concerto de l’asile — his Valse de l’asile fractured into a thousand variations, featuring an ecstatic Alain Lefèvre, who goes through these 44 hallucinatory minutes with genius at the tip of each finger. Alexander Shelley is equally remarkable in front of the l’Orchestre du Centre national des Arts, balancing dynamics with perfect mastery. Boudreau and Lefèvre transpose Gauvreau’s poetry into a neo-romanticism with dazzling colours.
