Reduction or transcription? What’s in a name? In the case of Ravel, whose works exhibit a remarkable fluidity between piano and orchestral scores, it’s a particularly thorny subject. Perhaps, as Munich-born pianist Yi Lin Jiang argues in his booklet notes, we shouldn’t really care as long as it’s good music (and in this case it most definitely is).

The piano score of Ravel’s ballet Daphnis et Chloé was created as an original reduction in 1910, two years before the work premiered in its orchestral version. Like many such impractical reductions, a pianist needs to decide what is and isn’t playable with just the two hands, especially as Ravel includes the wordless chorus parts. In this case, Jiang has approached the score with both intelligence and daring, especially with regard to the final Bacchanale, the movement that caused Ravel the most trouble.

“With the right hand mostly switching between winds and strings, adding more percussive beats to the left ‘chorus’ hand felt at first like reaching the limits of my finger movement, but in the end, it was worth the...