The Tangelwood Music Center Orchestra at Ozawa Hall, Tanglewood, Monday, July 14
Program
Ravel, “Mother Goose Suite,” conducted by Leonard Weiss
Ravel, “Daphis and Chloe Suite no. 2,” conducted by Yirin Zhao
Stravinsky, “The Rite of Spring,” conducted by Thomas Adès
Ravel, born 150 years ago in 1875, is being celebrated this summer at Tanglewood. He was a member of the generation of composers that decisively made the transition from romanticism to modernism. His most important predecessors were Debussy (b. 1862) and Satie (b. 1866)—notably, both French. But fully modernist figures show up as near contemporaries to Ravel—notably, Schoenberg and Ives (both b. 1874). Ravel is unique and in a way unclassifiable; his style owes much to Debussy, especially early on, but as he developed his own voice, he assimilated a host of other influences, from Chopin, Liszt, Mussorgsky, Borodin, Chabrier as well as earlier composers from Couperin, Haydn, Mozart, and even Bach, without imitating any of them. In comparing Debussy and Ravel, it may be fair to say that where Debussy was inspired directly by nature, Ravel’s inspiration often filtered through music itself; his is often music about other music, transformed through the filter of his distinctive imagination. A frequently applied descriptor is “magical.”
Ravel belonged to a generation of composers for whom tone color was being elevated to an importance equal to harmony, rhythm, and melody. This can apply not only to the orchestra but also to that most orchestral of instruments: the (modern) piano. Having heard two samples of his orchestral works on Monday night, “Mother Goose Suite” and “Daphnis and Chloe Suite no. 2,” followed by all of his piano music on Wednesday night, it also seems fair to say that he successfully cast himself in the role of musical wizard, able to conjure up new, distinct, and imaginative worlds of sounds with a wave of his pen. These do not duplicate of the worlds of Couperin, Mozart, Liszt, or Debussy; rather, they extract an essence and transpose it into a world of dreams and visions animated with precision and passion, joined to demands for virtuosity on the part of the performers, sometimes in extreme forms.
It was instructive to hear his music juxtaposed with that of his younger friend, Stravinsky. While it is often thought that “The Rite of Spring” of 1913 is the firm marker for the arrival of musical modernism, it is surprising to find that so many “new” features of the “Rite” are present earlier in Ravel, both in the realm of tone color and harmony, even including its evocation of violence (as in the 1908 “Gaspard de la Nuit”). Some of the music from “Daphnis and Chloe” (1909-1911) shows striking similarities to Stravinsky’s 1909 ballet “Firebird.” Russian critic Grigory Timofeyev noticed this in a review, writing of that score that despite its Russian origin, the “even larger influence of French modernism, in the persons of Debussy, Dukes, and Ravel … affected the author.” While many of their works share important traits, Ravel and Stravinsky each retained their own stylistic imprint.
The Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra concert of July 14 offered some of the best playing I have heard from that ensemble. The two assistant conductors drew appropriately sensual and magical sounds from the orchestra, with the strings displaying a particular sheen. The “Mother Goose Suite” originated, like so many other of Ravel’s orchestral works, as a piece for piano, in this case as a duet. The magic of this score is its surface simplicity; it was designed to be played by children, but in its expanded small-orchestral version, the light of the music is sent through a prism and emerges in a subtle but nevertheless dazzling spectrum of colors.
The performance of “The Rite of Spring” that followed, led by Thomas Adès (filling in for Esa-Pekka Salonen) left nothing to be desired and compared favorably with the powerful performance by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Giancarlo Guerrero eight years ago. Adès maintained tight control over biting rhythms and accents while adopting brisk tempos, allowing the young players to unleash their “primal” instincts, especially among the brasses. The result felt like a disciplined frenzy, one held strictly in place by the demands of score and conductor. Beautiful playing in the winds, especially alto flute and English horn, characterized the quieter sections, and Adès’ body language provided a clear road map for the players to follow. It was obvious that he has this score in his bones.
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Seong-Jin Cho, piano, Ozawa Hall, Tanglewood, Wednesday, July 16
Program
Ravel’s complete piano music
On Wednesday, July 17, Seong-Jin Cho performed the remarkable feat of playing all of Ravel’s piano music in one double-length concert with two intermissions. Each of the three “legs” of this program had its own character, with shorter and sometimes lesser-known pieces surrounding one or two of the larger works. In the first part, the main composition was still small scale, the miniature “Sonatine” of 1903-1905, whose glittering textures and luscious harmonies foreshadowed expanded magical piano sonorities still to come.
The “Sonatine” also reflected the seminal work that preceded it chronologically but followed it in the program: “Jeux d’eau” (fountains, literally, “the games of water”) of 1901. It was this piece that exerted a significant influence on Debussy and others. “Jeux d’eau” was inspired by Franz Liszt’s late piano piece “Les Jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este” of 1877. Liszt is not a composer usually associated with French “impressionism,” but his combination of virtuosity and colorful tone painting spurred the young Ravel to develop his own distinctive style of piano virtuosity, the fruits of which were apparent during the remainder of the program. Immediately after the first intermission, Seong-Jin Cho launched into “Miroirs” of 1904-1905, perhaps the most overtly graphic work on the program. Its five pieces portray the flight of moths, the songs of birds, the rocking of a boat, bells resounding in a valley, and, most famously, the dawn song of a jester, Alborada del Graciosa, reminding us of the composer’s Basque origins and affinity for Spanish music. Here, the pianist is tasked with evoking a guitar with its rapid, repeated notes, but going far beyond that instrument’s limitations with wide sweeps across the entire piano keyboard. Cho matched Ravel’s sonic magic with digital magic of his own, flowing through this thorny score with apparent ease and eliciting powerful waves of sound. Similar feats of prestidigitation were to follow.
Perhaps the most extreme point in Ravel’s solo keyboard music is his suite “Gaspard de la Nuit” (literally, “Treasurer of the Night”) from 1908. Possibly the most taxing piano work in the standard repertory, it also possesses a unique atmosphere: seductive, morbid, even decadent in the literary tradition of Poe and Baudelaire. It is a musical exemplar of fin de siècle aesthetics, based on three prose poems of Aloysius Bertrand from 1842. The uncanny images evoke equally original musical atmospheres, requiring transcendent keyboard technique. The opening of “Ondine,” suggesting this nymph’s watery abode, is a shimmering sonority that may be one of the most difficult technical challenges facing a concert pianist: It has to sound immobile while hovering in place like a hummingbird addressing a flower, but with an added aura of mystery. The second poem, “Le Gibet,” offers the lurid image of a hanged corpse in a barren landscape against a blood-red sunset and the tolling of bells. Here the pianist is challenged to produce bronze tone colors utilizing all the registers of the keyboard in a sustained, almost static acoustic space—a challenge of balancing touch, weight, and sonority at a very slow but inexorable pace. The final section depicts ‘Scarbo,” a shape-shifting goblin who keeps appearing and disappearing, up to extreme forms of mischief. Again, the virtuosity required (rapid traversals of the keyboard, swift repeated notes) stems from Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes, and there are technical and expressive features that were foreshadowed in the earliest work on Cho’s program, “Sérénade grotesque” of 1893 as well as in the aforementioned Alborada. Although Ravel was continuously developing his style, his individual musical personality seems to have been present from the beginning. Once again, Seong-Jin Cho’s mastery was fully apparent. In addition to his fluency and mastery of infinite gradations at the quiet end of the dynamic spectrum, his Gaspard performance revealed his strength, stamina, and power at the other extreme. At the end of this second leg of the program, the audience sprang to its feet to offer thunderous approval.
I had expected that the marathon length of the concert would cause many audience drop-outs after this second intermission, but that was not the case. The wizardry of both composer and pianist pulled most of us back into our seats. What followed was yet another dramatic shift in character. The two big sets and most of the short pieces in the third leg illustrated the ways in which music itself formed an important source of inspiration for Ravel. There was a minuet on the name of Haydn and pieces “in the manner of” Borodin and Chabrier. More substantially, there was a potpourri suite of “Valses nobles et sentimentales” (1911) ostensibly inspired by Schubert but taking in the whole Viennese waltz tradition of the 19th century, with strong foretastes of the great orchestral tone poem “La Valse” (1919-1920). As in the earlier “Sonatine,” “Valses nobles…” builds on older musical styles and absorbs them into Ravel’s personal idiom. This led to the final masterpiece of the evening, “Le Tombeau de Couperin” from (1914-1917). Although the idea of neoclassicism can be traced at least as far back as the late romantics such as Brahms and Grieg, Ravel updated it, building on the framework of earlier genres by infusing them with a modernist sensibility. Neoclassicism was apparent in the “Sonatine” with its use of sonata form and a second movement minuet, long before Stravinsky’s adoption of the aesthetic in his “Pulchinella” of 1922. “Le Tombeau” was inspired by French baroque harpsichord music in general (not necessarily Couperin’s—there were many such composers in the 17th and 18th centuries), and four of its six movements explicitly reference its genres: Prélude, Forlane, Rigaudon, and Menuet. In fact, the latter was the third menuet to be heard in this program. Added to these were forms associated with Bach: a fugue and a toccata, the latter furnishing a merger of neoclassicism and neo-Lisztian virtuosity as a fitting blow-out finale to the entire program.
The chronological arrangement of the program served as a self-demonstration of the remarkable way in which Ravel developed his style by a process of synthesis and refinement. The result is a body of work that lends itself perfectly to a long-form program such as the one so skillfully offered by pianist Seong-Jin Cho, whose sober demeanor and economical style preserved his remarkable stamina and concentration all the way to the end of this very satisfying program. He maintained energy and focus for two-and-a-half hours of complex music requiring the memorization of notes numbering probably in the millions. All of this was delivered with fluency, color, delicacy, power, and a fine appreciation for the individual qualities of each work. We can look forward to more Ravel at Tanglewood, specifically the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra’s performance of the opera “L’enfant et les sortilège” on Monday, August 4: more Ravel magic, not to be missed!
