Up to the challenge

Many of us know the horror of "blank page syndrome," in which freedom can feel like a creative shackle — perhaps unlocked, paradoxically, by setting oneself artificial constraints. Ravel loved a challenge, and many of his greatest works are proof that self-imposed limits can provide fertile ground for the great expansiveness of genius. The Boléro is the astonishing result of an exercise in repetition without development; the concluding Scarbo of piano suite Gaspard de la nuit was expressly written to be more difficult than Balakirev's Islamey; and in the Piano Concerto for Left Hand, commissioned by Paul Wittgenstein following a wartime injury, Ravel "gets more out of just five fingers than many others do out of an entire orchestra" (Vladimir Jankélévitch) …