are produced regularly in France and abroad. Other vocal works A substantial proportion of Ravel's output was vocal. His early works in that sphere include cantatas written for his unsuccessful attempts at the Prix de Rome. His other vocal music from that period shows Debussy's influence, in what Kelly describes as "a static, recitative-like vocal style", prominent piano parts and rhythmic flexibility. By 1906 Ravel was taking even further than Debussy the natural, sometimes colloquial, setting of the French language in Histoires naturelles. The same technique is highlighted in Trois poèmes de Mallarmé (1913); Debussy set two of the three poems at the same time as Ravel, and the former's word-setting is noticeably more formal than the latter's, in which syllables are often elided. In the cycles Shéhérazade and Chansons madécasses, Ravel gives vent to his taste for the exotic, even the sensual, in both the vocal line and the accompaniment. Ravel's songs often draw on vernacular styles, using elements of many folk traditions in such works as Cinq mélodies populaires grecques, Deux mélodies hébraïques and Chants populaires. Among the poets on whose lyrics he drew were Marot, Léon-Paul Fargue, Leconte de Lisle and Verlaine. For three songs dating from 1914 to 1915, he wrote his own texts. Although Ravel wrote for mixed choirs and male solo voices, he is chiefly associated, in his songs, with the soprano and mezzo-soprano voices. Even when setting lyrics clearly narrated by a man, he often favoured a female voice, and he seems to have preferred his best-known cycle, Shéhérazade, to be sung by a woman, although a tenor voice is a permitted alternative in the score. Orchestral works During his lifetime it was above all as a master of orchestration that Ravel was famous. He minutely studied the ability of each orchestral instrument to determine its potential, putting its individual colour and timbre to maximum use. The critic Alexis Roland-Manuel wrote, "In reality he is, with Stravinsky, the one man in the world who best knows the weight of a trombone-note, the harmonics of a 'cello or a pp tam-tam in the relationships of one orchestral group to another." For all Ravel's orchestral mastery, only four of his works were conceived as concert works for symphony orchestra: Rapsodie espagnole, La valse and the two concertos. All the other orchestral works were written either for the stage, as in Daphnis et Chloé, or as