RAVEL: PIANO CONCERTO IN G MAJOR

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

Maurice Ravel is another French composer, of Basque descent on his mother’s side, whose family moved to Paris when he was three months old. He entered the Conservatoire in 1889 to study the piano with Beriot and composition with Gabriel Faure. From his earliest works, composed in the late teens, his maturity of style and use of unorthodox harmonies were regarded with suspicion by the academics of the day, and he was repeatedly denied the highest award in the prix de Rome. The last occasion was in 1905, when his elimination at the preliminary stage caused such an uproar that the director of the Conservatoire was forced to resign. He is today best known for the inescapable Bolero, a piece for orchestra without music, as he himself described.

The Piano Concerto in G major, on which the composer worked for two years, was completed in time for the Festival Ravel at the Salle Pleyel, Paris, and first played there January 14, 1932, with publication the same year. The composer conducted the premiere, with Marguerite Long as soloist, to whom the concerto is dedicated. There are three movements: Allegraments,  Adagio assai and Presto. Ravel himself called this concerto the complete expression of his own development as a composer, and stated that he had put the best of himself into the music.

Ravel once called his G major Concerto a concerto in the strict sense, written in the spirit of Mozart and Saint-Saens. He added, less paradoxically, “I believe that a concerto can be gay and brilliant, and that there is no necessity for it to aim at profundity or big dramatic effects. It has been said that the concertos of some great classical composers were written not for but against the piano, and I think that this criticism is quite justified.”

I Allegramente. The gossamer lightness of the opening, with its sparky little tune for piccolo solo against shimmering bitonality arpeggios for the piano, soft string tremolos, pizzicatos, and a scarcely audible roll of the side drum, is an effect to remember. Hardly has the piccolo introduced the melody when it is taken up by a glittering trumpet solo, and it returns again to cap the climax of the brilliant first movement.

II Adagio assai. The slow movement begins with a long nocturne-like solo for unaccompanied piano. The ease with which the melody seems to flow may be misleading, for Ravel has told us that he constructed it very laboriously, two bars at a time, taking the slow movement to Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet as a model.

III. Presto. The finale is a dazzling piece of virtuosity for the soloist with light-textured, witty orchestral accompaniment. The many fragments of American jazz idiom of the finale. In any case, the entire conclusion flies at such supersonic speed that it seems to finish before it has started.