Water at the window: Lisitsa plays Ravel’s “Ondine” at ROYCO

Water at a moonlit window

Ravel opens Gaspard de la nuit with “Ondine.” In Aloysius Bertrand’s prose poem, the water spirit brushes drops across the resonant panes of a window under moonlight. Ravel’s three piano tableaux continue with “Le Gibet” and “Scarbo,” but this first scene begins with seduction, motion and disappearance rather than the darkness that follows.²³

That image gives Valentina Lisitsa’s performance a human entry point. Let the first pass unfold as a story rather than a display of difficulty. On the next, follow how the piano can suggest water without becoming a literal sound effect: a surface that keeps moving, a line that briefly comes forward and the point at which the figure seems to recede.²³

HFI used Lisitsa’s 1908 album, supplied as the Naïve V 7583 CD edition from 2021. Her official album page pairs Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit with Rachmaninoff’s First Piano Sonata.¹

Two analogue choices before the power amplifiers

A McIntosh MCD12000 played the disc through a C12000 preamplifier and MC1.25KW monoblock power amplifiers. Sonus faber Amati G5 loudspeakers completed the playback chain, with an AudioQuest Niagara 7000 power distributor and AudioQuest Dragon, Hurricane and Thunder-series cables.

This exact system has appeared in an earlier ROYCO article, where the Amati G5’s division between sealed midrange and vented bass supplied the technical question. The new architecture sits farther upstream. McIntosh provides the MCD12000 with both vacuum-tube and solid-state fixed analogue outputs, while the C12000 also provides separate vacuum-tube and solid-state outputs.⁴⁵

The useful listening question is not to guess a circuit from sound. Instead, keep attention on the musical hand-off through the chain: the fine movement at the opening, the more projected line when it arrives and the return to a less tangible surface. The documented architecture defines the system context; Lisitsa’s shaping of the scene remains the subject.⁴⁵

A sweet-spot perspective from ROYCO

HFI recorded the system at ROYCO in Seoul on 8 April 2025. A matched pair of DPA-4011 microphones fed a Zoom F8n Pro at 192 kHz/32-bit float. A laser distance meter matched the microphones’ distances from the loudspeakers at the position where that pair most closely captured the sound heard at the sweet spot. Kennerton Audio Rognir Bog Oak headphones with an Audience frontRow cable were used during production.

Begin at a comfortable headphone level and let “Ondine” keep its mystery. Then return to the window image and notice where motion feels continuous, where a melodic shape separates from the surrounding figuration and how the ending withdraws. Sit in your own sweet spot and let the water spirit leave without forcing a verdict on the system.²³