The other night, I caught NPR : The Industrious Nature of ‘Bolero’:
Bolero started out as a ballet score commissioned by dancer Ida Rubenstein. Her troupe danced the composition’s first performance at the Paris Opera in 1928. It was an instant hit.Ravel, whose roots were in the Basque country on the French-Spanish border, originally called the piece Fandango. As romantic as it may seem, Ravel said the pulsing, rhythmic composition was inspired by one of the factories he had visited with his father, who was an engineer.
“It’s the orchestra that makes it work,” Hoffman says. “It’s the colors in the orchestra. He keeps adding instruments, he keeps changing the orchestration. But he doesn’t change the tune, he doesn’t change the harmony, he doesn’t change the rhythm. Nothing changes except the orchestration — and the volume.”
The radio show cited an amusingly named CD compilation of nothing but Bolero variants: Ravel’s Greatest Hit: The Ultimate Bolero. (Note the singular Hit.)