Maurice Ravel

• Born: March 7, 1875, Ciboure France
• Died: December 28, 1937, Paris

Concerto in G Major for Piano and Orchestra

• Composed: 1931
  
• Premiere: January 14, 1932, Ravel conducting, with pianist Marguerite Long and the Lamoureux Orchestra in Paris 
• Instrumentation: solo piano, flute, piccolo, oboe, English horn, clarinet, E-flat clarinet, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, trumpet, trombone, timpani, bass drum, crash cymbals, slapstick, suspended cymbals, tam-tam, tamburo, triangle, wood block, harp, strings
  
• CSO notable performances: First Performance: October 1932, Eugene Goossens conducting, with Daniel Ericourt, piano. Most Recent: November 2021, Roderick Cox conducting, with Conrad Tao, piano. Other: March 1997, Carnegie Hall, Jesús López Cobos conducting, with Alicia De Larrocha, piano. November 1945, Leonard Bernstein conducting from the piano.
• Duration: approx. 23 minutes

Some of the most original piano music in the first half of the 20th century was written by Maurice Ravel. In the early Jeux d’eau (1901) and the great cycles Miroirs (1904–05) and Gaspard de la nuit (1908), Ravel developed what he himself called “a special type of writing for the piano,” and he defended his priority against critics who tried to trace his style to that of his older contemporary, Debussy.

Himself a highly competent pianist, Ravel was a frequent performer of his own music (his performances survive on record). Thus, it is not entirely surprising that he should want to write a concerto; what is surprising is that it took him so long to do so.

Ravel had been toying with the idea of a concerto as early as 1906. He was thinking about basing it on Basque themes, from his native region in the Pyrenees. The projected work even had a title: Zaspiak-Bat, which means “The Seven Are One” in the Basque language—an allusion to the unity of the four Spanish and three French Basque provinces. But Zaspiak-Bat seems never to have progressed beyond the stage of initial sketches; World War I intervened, and Ravel, who had enlisted for military duty, complained in a letter to a friend: “Impossible to continue Zaspiak-Bat, the documents having remained in Paris.” Instead, the composer took up other projects, and the concerto plans remained on the back burner until the late 1920s.

It was in 1928, after his American tour, that he began seriously to think about a concerto again. In the wake of this tour—and the recent, wildly successful premiere of Boléro—Ravel wanted to make the most of his popularity and decided to return to the concert stage as a pianist, as his friend Igor Stravinsky had done a few years earlier. His work on a piano concerto was interrupted by one-armed pianist Paul Wittgenstein’s commission to write a concerto for the left hand only. Ravel worked on both concertos more or less at the same time.

Ravel emphasized his debt to Mozart and Saint-Saëns in the G-major Concerto, but there are also many signs of jazz influence in the piece, particularly in the first movement. Ravel had been interested in jazz since the early 1920s when it first became the rage in Paris. He had included a “Blues” movement in his Sonata for Violin and Piano, written between 1923 and 1927. His enthusiasm grew considerably, however, after his visit to the United States.

The first movement has many of the trappings of classical sonata form: a succession of contrasting themes and a clearly recognizable moment at which the recapitulation begins. But the emphasis, as always with Ravel, is not so much on motivic development as on the juxtaposition of self-contained melodies. The first one of these melodies is introduced by the piccolo in a very fast tempo; the piano accompanies it with lively figurations. This theme has been said to suggest a Basque folk melody: it probably contains material from the abandoned Zaspiak-Bat concerto. After this first theme, the tempo slows down and the high-pitched E-flat clarinet plays the first of several jazz-related motifs. The movement has a magnificent piano cadenza at the end, preceded by two other striking solo passages: one for the harp, and one in which one woodwind instrument after another plays virtuoso flourishes against the sustained melody of the first horn.

The second movement opens with a long, expressive piano solo. It is a single uninterrupted phrase that goes on for more than three minutes; after a while, the piano is joined by the flute, oboe and clarinet. There is a middle section where the piano plays in a faster motion against the slow-moving melodies in the orchestra. The initial long phrase then returns, played by the English horn, and accompanied by the crystalline thirty-second notes of the piano. Ravel said that he had modelled this movement on the “Larghetto” from Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet (K. 581); the connection is subtle, but it can be clearly heard in the softly moving long phrases in 3/4 time and the rich ornamentation of the melodic lines.

The last movement is a lively romp in perpetual motion. Like the first movement, it is a cavalcade of themes including allusions to marches, dances and folk songs, and containing some jazzy “smears” in the trombones and demanding solos for the woodwinds. The high jinks continue until the timpani and the bass drum put an abrupt end to the music.

As he said in the statement quoted above, Ravel was planning to play the piano part in his concerto himself. Sadly, he was prevented from doing so by the onset of his illness, which proved fatal. He developed a progressively incapacitating nervous disorder which made it impossible for him to play the piano; although, in 1932, he was still able to conduct. He entrusted the solo part to Marguerite Long, a great pianist who had been a close friend and dedicated performer of his works for many years, and they took the concerto on tour in some twenty European cities. In January 1933, Ravel conducted the premiere of his Concerto for the Left Hand and, shortly afterwards, finished the three songs Don Quichotte à Dulcinée for voice and orchestra. But soon he was no longer able to read music or sign his name, much less to compose (though his hearing, his musical judgement, and his intelligence in general remained unimpaired). The G-major Concerto remained Ravel’s penultimate composition, a fact belied by the work’s freshness and youthful vigor. One may understand Ravel’s distress when, in the last year of his life and gravely ill, he burst into tears: “I still have so much music in my head. I have said nothing. I have so much more to say.”

—Peter Laki