An Iberian influence colours much of Maurice Ravel's finest work, not least Bolero. Christopher Morley looks at his genius.

We think of Maurice Ravel as the quintessential Parisian dandy, Homburg hat at a natty angle, watch-chain clinking against a pin-striped blazer over immaculate, razor-creased dark trousers, silver-topped cane much in evidence and a cigarette-holder at his lips.

And yet there is a swarthier side to the composer, a Spanish element which emerges again and again in his immaculately-crafted scores. Ravel’s mother came from the Basque region, and whether consciously or not, an Iberian atmosphere pervades so much of his output, despite the fact that he never set foot in Spain until 1935, two years before his death after an unsuccessful operation for a brain tumour.

The Spanish idiom colours so many of Ravel’s compositions, most spectacularly in his one-act opera L’Heure Espagnole. This is a charming farce about the young wife of an elderly watch-maker (Ravel’s father was of Swiss derivation – could there be an horological link there?), who takes advantage of her husband’s weekly hour-long absence winding the Town Hall clock to entertain her lover.

Unfortunately she has more than one admirer, and they all turn up at the same time. Carry on ticking, yes, but let’s not overlook how subtly the Spanish idiom is engrained in this delightful score.

L’Heure Espagnole is the largest of Ravel’s compositions, though the Hellenic ballet Daphnis and Chloe and his other opera, the typically Parisian, Colette-derived L’Enfant et les Sortileges come close. Yet all through the gamut of his works a whiff of Spain emerges from so many of them, including the magnificent Concerto for Piano Left Hand and Orchestra, whose opening emerges from subterranean darkness into a soundscape of Castilian grandeur.

Many small piano works by Ravel look nostalgically to Spain: the Habanera, Pavane pour une Infante Defunte, Alborada del Gracioso, and others.

With a pragmatic eye to the market, he orchestrated some of these. The Pavane is a grave little masterpiece to insert into a lollipops-style programme, and the Alborada del Gracioso (literally “the Jester’s Dawn Song”) is a lot of fun.

But the biggest individual Spanish-inspired piece of them all is the Bolero, famous in a truncated form for the maximum point-winning ice-skating performance by Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean in the 1980s, but more famous, I hope, for the spectacle of its sustained crescendo over 17 stamina-sapping minutes for the snare-drummer, tapping out an incessant rhythm as his orchestral colleagues, including oboe d’amore, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, trumpet in D and three saxophones, gradually overlay each other.