St Petersburg, Concert Hall

Ravel

With Artist of the Month Ekaterina Semenchuk (mezzo-soprano)
and the Mariinsky Orchestra
Conductor: Daniel Smith

The programme includes:
Maurice Ravel
Le Tombeau de Couperin
Schéhérazade
for voice and orchestra
La Valse, choreographic poem
Orchestra suite No 2 Daphnis et Chloé
Pavane pour une infante défunte
Boléro
Dance, Ravel, your magnificent dance,
Dance, Ravel! Don’t be downcast, you Spaniard!

Nikolai Zabolotsky. Boléro

In giving today’s concert this title, we are somehow admitting that it cannot fully embrace the entire legacy of one of the greatest orchestral maestri of 20th century music. Even the none-too-discerning music-lover has probably heard Ravel’s striking arrangement for piano of Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition at least once.
Many of Maurice Ravel’s own symphonic masterpieces were also initially conceived as individual pieces or extensive cycles for piano. A brilliant pianist who performed his own works, Ravel is a true poet of the piano. Because of the picturesque nature of their structure, the composer’s opuses for piano seem to call out to the orchestra. Ravel emphasised the similarities between his method of composing and the work of an artist who creates a graphic image on canvas using brushes and paints. “Initially,” he once remarked, “I mark out the horizontals and the verticals, and then, as artists might say, I begin to paint.”

Pavane pour une infante défunte for piano (1899) was the young composer’s first piece to bring him popularity among both amateur and professional musicians alike. All of the merits of its simple plastique form, the sincerity of its lyrical expression and the fluidity of the melodic movement were also retained by the composer in his orchestral version of this early dance, while the vivid harmonies à la Debussy sounded even more attractive.

The vocal cycle Shéhérazade (1903) is a triad of poems for voice and orchestra to verse by Tristan Klingsor through which the composer, in his own words, “fell under the spell of the charm of the orient which had deeply fascinated me even as a child.” This was the charm of the Russian orient, which had first resounded so powerfully in the music of Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and Balakirev... But in everything – in the pliant recitatives originating with Musorgsky, the ornamental melodies, the “spicy” orchestration that reminds one of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Schéhérazade and, lastly, the purely French refinement of the vocal prosody – in everything one can sense the vivid individuality of Ravel’s maturing genius.

The premiere of the ballet Daphnis et Chloé (1912) in a production by Sergei Diaghilev’s ballet company (choreographed by Michel Fokine and designed by Léon Bakst) was a triumph for Ravel. The two orchestral suites compiled by the composer from the music for the ballet include the most expansive scenes – in a musical sense – of the full score. Ravel defined the genre of the work as a “choreographic symphony”; by structuring the music of the ballet on the laws of major symphonic form, he introduced symphonic elements into the choreography. The second orchestral suite from Daphnis et Chloé is particularly well-loved by both musicians and audiences.

Le Tombeau de Couperin is a series of pieces for piano that Ravel began in 1914 and completed after returning from the army in 1917. In the words of the composer himself, the cycle “is in fact dedicated not so much to Couperin himself as to French music of the 18th century” and is essentially a series of early dances (in the spirit and style of keyboard suites for French harpsichordists). It should also be noted that each of the pieces is individually dedicated to the memory of one of Ravel’s friends who died during the war. The composer’s orchestral version of the suite (1919) has proved to be no less popular.

La Valse (1920) is a poème chorégraphique of which there are versions for orchestra and for one or two pianos. “I conceived this Valse as an apotheosis to the Viennese waltz which in my mind’s eye blends together the sensation of a fantastical and deadly whirlwind,” Ravel wrote. The score is prefaced by the following programme note: “In the clearings among the clouds hastened on by the whirlwind, one can see glimpses of couples waltzing. The clouds are gradually dispelled: one is faced with a huge hall filled with dancers. The stage is lit more and more powerfully. The dazzle of the chandeliers fills the hall...” From the mysterious first bars that seem to feel for the waltz rhythm, through the Strauss-like ravishing chain of waltzes and on to the vertiginous “dancing on top of a volcano” (an expression of one of the composer’s contemporaries) – that is the implacable subject logic of Ravel’s poem. La Valse is a grandiose tableau of “death among dazzle.”

“In 1928, at the request of Monsieur Rubinstein, I composed my Boléro for orchestra. It is a dance in a very measured tempo, changing neither melodically, harmoniously nor rhythmically, and yet the rhythm is constantly marked by the beating of the drum. The only element of variety comes with the orchestral crescendo,” Maurice Ravel wrote twenty years later in his Esquisse autobiographique.
Valentin Serov, who painted a well-known portrait of Ida Rubinstein after falling under the spell of her interpretation of the roles of Cleopatra and Schéhérazade with Diaghilev’s company, said that “Egypt and Assyria themselves somehow came back to life with this extraordinary woman.” This time, too, she enchanted the audience, naturally sharing the glory with the composer and Alexandre Benois who had designed the sets. The premiere of Boléro took place on 28 November 1928 at the Opéra de Paris on the same evening as a performance of La Valse, another of Maurice Ravel’s poèmes symphoniques.
From the very start of the piece there is some mysterious anxiety creeping in. Restrained and sorrowful, the incredibly long melody with its unchanging theme becomes an iron-like and persistently repetitive rhythm... When, after the seemingly infinite repetition of the theme, the sound reaches apocalyptical power, when the melody suddenly begins to disintegrate into individual intonations, when the unexpected shift in tonality literally tears the theme from its steel carcass of rhythm and thrusts it into a chasm of impending catastrophe, one has the uncomfortable feeling that the world is collapsing... It was not by chance that one of the composer’s friends, André Suarès, wrote on the anniversary of Ravel’s death that “The obsession of the rhythm and the melody and the clear desire not to vary the theme ... was an insistent, almost hallucinogenic repetition of one and the same musical phrase, a gloomy frenzy of music – all of this, in my opinion, transforms this famous piece into something akin to Songs and Dances of Death.
Iosif Raiskin

Age category 6+

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