by liberal japonicus
Last week, I mentioned Daphnis et Chloé by Maurice Ravel, so down the rabbit hole we go. My favorite work by Ravel is Le Tombeau de Couperin, and I was able to find the album that was my first listen to this.
Had I heard that earlier in my life, I might have gone for the oboe instead of the horn. The title of the piece was echoed by Douglas Hofstadter’s book Le Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language, which is worth a read. One of the fun things about Ravel’s music is that he often recast piano pieces as orchestral compositions, so here is the piano version, played by Yeon Eum Son. It was written in 1919 and each movement was dedicated to a friend of Ravel who was killed in WWI. I find there is a tone that is both wistful and sad, but a number of people complained that it was not elegaic enough. Ravel’s response was “The dead are sad enough, in their eternal silence”.
I think that Ravel in particular and French composers in general doesn’t get their due because they don’t write in the symphony format. Ravel’s career is also on opposite sides of the First World War and that historical disjunction breaks up his works and didn’t allow him to grow in a way that we can track. Another piece that seems like a gimmick is his Piano concerto for the left hand, written for Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm during war (and was the older brother of Ludwig Wittgenstein)
The concerto is interesting, but I’d have to give Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major the edge. Both concertos were influenced by Ravel’s encounter with Gershwin, (the part from 1:06 for example), though some parts sound like Stravinsky. (from 3:55)
I mentioned that I thought Russian music was played best by Russian orchestras, and I think to a lesser extent, this is true with French orchestral music. I’ve not been able to play a lot of orchestral pieces by French composers, in part because the music makes some pretty strong demands on the strings, requiring a really high level of ability and pretty near perfect intonation, which often rules out semi-professional level players. This next video is all of Ravel’s orchestral music, done by the Orchestre de L’Opéra National de Paris, but just listen to Alborada del Gracioso at the beginning. All the other versions sound plodding compared to this.
Another factor is that there are two schools of playing for some of the instruments. This division has become blurred, but for horn, the French sound is lighter with a strong vibrato, with the horn having a smaller bore (the German sound eschews vibrato and has a darker tone). In fact, I had gotten the Cluytens album because Pavane was my audition piece. If you skip to the 22:04, you can hear the horn open in Pavane pour une Infante Défunte with that French sound that is reminiscent of a saxophone. For comparison, here is Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Pierre Boulez and the soloist is Richard King. The US style of horn playing is primarily German because of German immigration and early orchestras were primarily German immigrants.
Ravel is often considered the foremost orchestrator, so this string quartet was astonishing to me is that he gets many of the same harmonies with only 4 voices.
What do y’all think?
Thank you.
I think that Ravel in particular and French composers in general doesn’t get their due because they don’t write in the symphony format.
That’s very true and I have been guilty of dismissing them as slightly gauche and inconsequential myself, being very German about it all, lol.
I mentioned that I thought Russian music was played best by Russian orchestras, and I think to a lesser extent, this is true with French orchestral music.
My go-to recordings for Ravel and Debussy for years were actually the Orchestre Symphonique du Montréal on Decca. Their long-time conductor (1978-2002) left acrimoniously after labor disputes and has since been the subject of multiple sexual assault allegations, but the orchestra’s recordings are (mostly) excellent, both in performance and recording acoustics.
“Their long-time conductor (1978-2002) left acrimoniously after labor disputes and has since been the subject of multiple sexual assault allegations”
Well, at least not Nazi-adjacent like von Karajan.
It can be SO hard to separate artistic excellence from non-artistic assholery. It works much better when all the artists are long dead.
Maybe that’s why “vita brevis, ars longa” is important.
It is unsurprising to me that you have so many problems with conductors, the whole hierarchical culture and the intense competition in some ways overdetermined this kind of outcome. I try to avoid putting up Gergiev (he used to come through Kumamoto at least once a year and sometimes twice with the Marinsky Orchestra because of Yoko Nagae Ceschina, who was originally from Kumamoto) because of links to Putin and Celibidache, who was one of the main antagonists in the Abbe Conant story and now, Dutoit.
Solti was known as ‘the screaming skull’ but apparently mellowed in later years. Going further back, you hear stories of Reiner and Toscanini (rehearsal recordings like this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=886gkXViXi8 make those stories of the music librarian ‘pre-sawing’ the batons so they would break easily, because they realized that after he broke a baton, he’d calm down, easier to give credence to)
A famous brass anecdote was Ravelli, the U of Mich band director, who often use to isolate a section and make each player perform the offending passage to humiliate them and one time, he went down and one by one, they misplayed the passage until the last one absolutely nailed it, and Ravelli, not missing a beat, says ‘you were late for rehearsal last week, what were you doing?’
However, when you are in that environment, those kind of incidents become a sort of glue that the ensemble holds on to, It’s no surprise that other high stress team environments (like the chef and the brigade de cuisine) exhibit similar tendencies.
Regarding the hierarchical culture, it’s interesting that the Berlin Philharmonics, who choose their own conductors in a democratic vote, picked a series of nice guys (after Karajan):
Abbado, Rattle, Petrenko.
(Rattle’s early relationship with the orchestra was described by himself as “turbulent” but watching them perform over the years, I felt that these were birthpangs. Also, he had a lot of unfair detractors in Germany.)
Interestingly, they also always picked the candidates that embodied a turning away from Karajan’s heavy, 19th century ‘German’ style.
Abbado over Maazel and Barenboim
Rattle over Barenboim
Petrenko over Thielemann
novakant’s comment had me dig around a bit, and I found Misha Aster’s The Reich’s Orchestra: The Berlin Philharmonic 1933-45. I’m through the 1st chapter, which describes how the orchestra, because of the state of the German economy, appealed to the government for support and entangled itself with the Nazis and I realized that governmental sponsorship and the history of orchestras are probably also why I have the differing ideas about German and French composers. The French government sponsorship of orchestras is much more limited (30-40 ensembles in France versus 129 in Germany according to Gemini) and looking at the histories of various orchestras, a large number of them originated as Staatskapelle, or the private orchestras of the various small states before German unification. Thus, you get the competition that gives rise to the symphonic tradition. So its understandable why things are weighted towards that German tradition.
lj, you might be interested in this (free reg. required):
https://www.digitalconcerthall.com/en/film/108
The “Reichsorchester”
In 2007, the Berliner Philharmoniker celebrated their 125th anniversary. Film director Enrique Sánchez Lansch took this occasion to tell a hitherto unknown chapter in the history of the Berliner Philharmoniker: the years of National Socialism from 1933 to 1945.
Not the greatest doc ever, but very informative.
novakant, thanks!