Given his reputation as an expert orchestrator, and especially the extent to which his compositions seem to be as much about sonority and color as about melody and harmony, it can come as a surprise to remember that many of Ravel's well-known orchestral works started out as piano pieces. Stravinsky derided him as a "Swiss watchmaker," referring to what he perceived as a fussiness about crafting orchestral sound and a lack of soul in his music. But it would be an error to conclude that Ravel had no emotional connection to his compositions. In the case of Le tombeau de Couperin, Ravel selected the title not only to demonstrate homage to an earlier composer and style, but also to acknowledge the loss of some of his friends to World War I.
The piano version of Le tombeau de Couperin, in six movements, was written in 1917; the orchestral version came just three years later. As Ravel would later explain, his object of tribute in this work was not necessarily François Couperin (1668-1733) in particular, but rather early 18th-century French music in general. For the orchestral version, Ravel chose only the four movements that he thought would be most effective, achieving in this transcription his usual brilliance of color and sonority. The opening figuration, not much of an issue on the piano, becomes a wonderfully idiomatic excerpt for the solo oboe, and the woodwind writing throught the first movement is particularly graceful. Also especially noteworthy is the middle section of the Menuet, in which parallel triads from the piano original are transcribed into a curious combination of wind timbres: the solo trumpet and solo horn, each muted, playing the outer voices, with the middle voices filled in by the clarinets.