MAURICE RAVEL
Born March 7, 1875, Ciboure, Basses Pyrénées, France
Died December 28, 1937, Paris, France
Piano Concerto in G Major
- Allegramente (9’)
- Adagio assai (10’)
- Presto (4’)
Last performed at the Wichita Symphony by pianist Kirell Gerstein with Music Director Andrew Sewell on January 17 and 18, 2009.
Already considered France’s most famous living composer, Maurice Ravel celebrated the New Year of 1928 with his arrival in the United States for a four-month concert tour. His journey took him to twenty-five American cities where he conducted his music for orchestra and performed recitals of his piano music and songs. He even stopped in Kansas City to present a well-attended recital in the ballroom of the Hotel Meuhlebach.
When he wasn’t performing on his tour, Ravel spent much time absorbing the sounds of American jazz, which he confessed to enjoying far more than he did grand opera. Jazz had been introduced to Parisians by the African American regimental bands during World War One, and by the 1920s had become all the rage in Paris. In New York City, Ravel met George Gershwin and accompanied him to the Cotton Club and Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. At a party celebrating Ravel’s birthday, Gershwin entertained guests with an impromptu performance of his Rhapsody in Blue and several song arrangements. Like Dvorak, three decades earlier, Ravel encouraged Americans to embrace their native music and specifically to “take jazz seriously,” for it was “bound to influence modern music.”
Upon returning home from his American tour in April 1928, Ravel wrote the G Major Concerto. Shortly after beginning work on the concerto, Ravel was commissioned by the one-armed pianist and World War One veteran Paul Wittgenstein for a piano concerto for the left hand. Thus, for several years Ravel worked on both works simultaneously, occasionally incorporating ideas in one work that he had rejected for the other.
It is interesting to compare the two concertos, both of which display the influence of jazz. The Left Hand Concerto is dark, foreboding, and tension-filled with many jazz harmonies and rhythmic elements, whereas the G Major is brilliant, bright, and infused with dance and jazz-like rhythms. Ravel described the G Major as “a concerto in the most exact sense of the term” and one “written in the spirit of Mozart and Saint-Saëns. It includes some elements of jazz, but only in moderation.”
Ravel intended to perform the premiere of the G Major Concerto himself, using it as a showcase for a planned second tour of the United States, which did not occur. Due to his declining and fragile health, Ravel turned the premiere over to Marguerite Long. She performed the work in Paris on January 14, 1932, with Ravel conducting only nine days after the premiere of the Left Hand Concerto by Wittgenstein in Vienna. Except for a set of three songs about Don Quixote, these would be the last works that Ravel completed before his death in 1937.
[The Wichita audience will note that Ravel’s Concerto premiered one and a half years before Florence Price’s Symphony No. 1, also heard on this program. The two works are good examples of how musical styles took divergent paths during the 20th century.]
The first movement (allegramente, or cheerfully) contrasts brilliant themes reflecting Ravel’s fascination with mechanical devices with themes that are languid and somewhat “bluesy.” The opening snaps us to attention with a whip and a perky piccolo melody that the trumpet repeats. The contrasting theme from the piano is reminiscent of qualities in Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. The movement is in the traditional sonata-allegro form of the classical era concerto with an exposition of the themes, a brief, energetic development, and a recapitulation that loosely repeats the opening themes while adding cadenzas for the harp and piano. Tension and momentum build to the end until the piece finally unravels in a descending scale punctuated at the bottom by the bass drum.
The second movement (adagio assai, or very slow) is one of Ravel’s most beautiful creations. It opens with an extended, unaccompanied piano solo. This poignant, bittersweet waltz recalls the Gymnopédies of Satie and the Berceuse of Chopin with its ostinato left hand and a spun-out melody in the right that runs for thirty-six measures, far longer than the usual four or eight-bar phrases. A painstaking composer, Ravel rarely completed anything in a flash of inspiration, and the opening of this spontaneous-sounding slow movement was no different. Ravel stated, “The flowing phrase…How I worked over it bar by bar! It nearly killed me!” Eventually, the woodwinds enter, and each principal takes up the melody in turn in a seamless manner that is the mark of a master orchestrator. While the bass rhythms remain constant, Ravel increases the textural intensity with piano filigrees around the melody until the opening theme returns in an extended solo for the English horn. The movement dies away on a trill in the piano.
The third movement (presto, very quickly) is a perpetual motion piece that whirls away with clock-like motion. Bass drum, snare drum, and woodblock interject their percussive sounds, and Ravel treats the orchestra in a kaleidoscope of color with melodic fragments tossed about in a veritable free-for-all. The piano writing is virtuosic and brilliant, and the bass drum once again punctuates the final cadence.
The Piano Concerto in G lasts approximately 23 minutes. It is scored for solo piano, piccolo, flute, oboe, English horn, B-flat and E-flat clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, trumpet, trombone, timpani, triangle, snare drum, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, woodblock, whip, harp, and strings.
SIDEBAR: Was Ravel an Impressionist Composer?
Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy are often linked together as the two major proponents of the French Impressionist style of musical composition. The term “impressionism” emerged in 1874 from an 1872 painting of Claude Monet titled “Impression: Sunrise.” Impressionism describes atmospheric paintings concerned with light and color, and it is associated with painters like Monet, Sisley, Renoir, Degas, and others. It later became used to describe the music of Debussy and Ravel, composed between the 1890s and World War One.
To label Ravel as an impressionist composer is somewhat misleading. Ravel, like Debussy, disliked the term and never used it to describe his music. Ravel’s works, such as Miroirs, Gaspard de la Nuit, and Daphnis and Chlöe, use the impressionist styles of color and imagery in music. And yet, Ravel was also inspired by the French clavecin school of the 18th century, Mozart, folk music, and even jazz. Much of Ravel’s music, particularly some of the works composed after World War One, were part of the neoclassic style of composers like Stravinsky.
Note by Don Reinhold © 2020, rev. 2022
