Is there any composer whose music expends more craft, on a bar-by-bar basis, than Ravel?
Well, ok, so that isn’t really a sensible or meaningful question, but it’s hard to escape the feeling when you’re actually listening to Ravel that his music is put together with a level of care and precision that no other composer quite matches. Dedicated to 6 friends who died in WWI, Le Tombeau de Couperin is the last set of solo piano works Ravel wrote, as well as the last works he wrote in any “antique” form. Le Tombeau represents a fusion of classical discipline & economy with colouristic imagination of the highest order – each of these pieces could be the subject of a longish essay, and despite my best efforts any description will bust YT’s limit, so I’ve put it in the comments.