JEAN-EFFLAM BAVOUZET

In the words of Vlado Perlemuter, ‘When I was studying Scarbo with Ravel, he said to me: “I wanted to produce a caricature of Romanticism”. But he added in a second breath: “Perhaps I got carried away”.  

The ironic distance, the multiplication of styles and influences and the extreme opacity of the harmonic language make Gaspard de la Nuit one of the summits of Ravel’s piano literature. From the mysterious song of ‘Ondine’, the French incarnation of the Germanic Lorelei, to the demonic arabesques of ‘Scarbo’, doubtless inspired by Liszt’s ‘Mephisto-Waltz’, Ravel takes figures we heard in the first concert, such as the jester spirit of the Sérénade Grotesque, further than ever before. The concert’s other masterpiece is Le Tombeau de Couperin, which, when composed in 1917, sounds as much a tribute to French musical tradition as to the soldiers who fell in the Great War. Marguerite Long, who created the piece, had to weave the entire work during its premiere. Four short meditative pieces complete the program: in the Prelude in A minor, Ravel develops a harmonic language close to that of Scriabin, while he draws inspiration from a gentle waltz rhythm to pastiche Borodine, and from a melody in Gounod’s Faust to give a counterpoint to Chabrier. He even contributed a minuet to the gigantic collective work written for the centenary of Haydn’s death (1909), in which harmonic audacity vies with melancholy and tenderness for the dance rhythms of the past.