this movement suffers all kind of abuse by being included in compilations of adagios and being played just as fully and lushly as possible. not that there's not a place for that in this gorgeous four minutes, but i think most will agree that the most magical are the pianissimo first twenty bars (and the moment at which the climax you want at 1:27 - a lot more yearning in the orchestral version - gets cut off by another pianissimo).
i don't think this movement requires any imagery besides that which he gives you in the title. it's such a rich image - a nighttime garden, which begins to glow softly with fairy light. he holds off the full glow for so long that by the time 2:49 comes you practically want to cry when you see that your hopes are actually going to be realized.
of course, those who have heard the orchestral version will yearn for the power and dynamic of the full orchestra. but i think there is something endearingly chordal about this piano version.
"When I think of your good heart, you do not seem so ugly." "Oh, I should say so! I have a good heart, but I am a monster." "There are many men who are more monstrous than you." "If I were witty I would pay you a great compliment to thank you, but I am only a beast."
"Beauty, would you like to be my wife?" "No, Beast!"
"I die happy because I have the pleasure of seeing you once again." "No, my dear Beast, you shall not die. You shall live to become my husband." ... The Beast had disappeared, and she beheld at her feet a prince more handsom than Amor, who was thanking her for having lifted his spell.
this is the movement that taps into a story we all know. from ravel's description we can easily match up which parts of this conversation map to his quotes and characters. the lovely introductory melody represents the belle, and at 1:16 the low chromatic melody represents the beast (this is a contrabassoon in the orchestral version). clearly the first climax right after this around 2:00 is meant to be the first rejection.
i think in the original fairy tale the beast begins to die here of heartbreak (not like in disney with the angry mob and battering ram). i'm not sure i agree with the cartoon's interpretation, given the content association of the first climax (which is more or less the same, but less intense). i think that perhaps the second climax at 2:50 is meant to be when beauty realizes the beast is dying - and then realizes her affection for him.
the transformative moment after that is given to a violin solo with these really difficult harmonics, in the orchestral version. a cello enters afterwards with a much higher version of the beast theme - perhaps meant to be the beast after his transformation.
"She undressed and got into the bath. Immediately the toy mandarins and mandarinesses began to sing and to play instruments. Some had theorbos made from walnut shells; some had viols made from almond shells; for the instruments had to be of a size appropriate to their own."
this is probably my favorite animation of the set.
the movement is formally complete, more than the two vignettes we just heard. it has a twinkling exposition full of little sixteenth note licks, and a middle section with a more sinuous melody (in the orchestral version played by a clarinet and accompanied by gong strikes). the recap is fantastic and ends the movement with a flash of brilliance.
i think this movement benefits the most from orchestration. though the piano can attain some of that spark and cleanliness, nothing can substitute for the color and pizzazz added by the celeste, percussion, string pizz and lush chords, and wind solos. i love ravel's use of the upper range here, clearly used to effect the miniature instruments. many oriental-affecting classical pieces have the tendency to saturate with pentatonic scale. ravel does this here, but has some interesting twists: listen at 1:59. gorgeous
in english: Tom Thumb, a little character in english folklore who gets in all sorts of trouble because of his size, which is about that of a thumb. (cool trivia: wiki says that this little fairy tale was the very first to be printed in english.) in this movement, he has left a trail of bread crumbs behind him so as not to get lost...
"He believed he'd easily find his way because of the bread that he'd strewn all along his path; but he was very surprised to find not a single crumb: the birds had come and eaten everything."
the music in this movement is easily evocative of directionless meandering owing to its inconsistent meter (6/4, 5/4, 4/4, 3/4 all included), and of a sort of miniature scale world owing to its scant orchestration. the tempo in this version is a bit brisker than i would like, but it does give that steady flow that's the most important thing in this movement.
at 1:59 you can hear the bird calls. the rising high notes are one, and the "cuckoo" afterwards is another. presumably these are the ones who have eaten his bread crumbs.
my favorite moment is the very last chord... the key is nebulous (probably c minor given the key signature, but the harmonies take it in a sort of whole-tone direction), but all of a sudden we end on a c major chord.
the french is too long to put in the title and fairly useless for those who read this anyway.
i'm trying to make a comeback on this blog after viewing the stats feature and seeing that sometimes folks from random other places (switzerland? australia, apparently??) land here. sorry for the leave.
true to form, ravel put this piece in three different forms and it's hard to find a recording of the version i know best, the "suite" of five orchestral pieces. i think it's best known in its original piano duo form, a fairly easy little set which he composed for two children of close friends of his (his second family, of sorts, after his father's death). the piano duo version was composed in 1910, and the year after he orchestrated it. in 1912 he added two new movements to the orchestral version, and this is usually the version that orchestras play and record today. anyway, today i cover the suite in its original form, which is obviously not quite as colorful as the orchestral format but lovely in its simplicity.
i could put a more illustrious recording up, but part of me has always been enamored of fantasia enough to have a long-held dream of continuing its vision of pairing animation with classical music. i don't think i would usually want to promote a single set of images over another, but ravel was pretty obvious when he named these pieces and inserted blurbs before every one that he wanted kids to be able to access these pieces through stories. (actually, he fails to insert blurbs before the first and last pieces. but the first one is so short and the last one so colorful that the music serves fine in these cases.) so this little animation exercise won me over immediately, and the playing is beautiful and simple.
the pavane of the sleeping beauty is a scant 20 bars in a minor, clocking in at less than two minutes. in the orchestral version the lines are carried by soft solo winds, and tiptoing pizz in the strings. the meter and form don't really follow the "pavane" technically, but there are two adjectives which typically get paired when talking about pavanes: slow and stately, which both describe this movement nicely.
i was originally going to post this on my normal blog but then realized that it is far too boring and possibly technical for my friends to read without being completely deterred from ever reading my blog again. so this will now go on the blog which everyone who reads should know that by doing so they are getting into some serious and potentially technical discussions of music!
i have come to the realization that at the youth orchestra nobody even thinks about half of the things that i used to worry about and would still find at or near the top of my priority list were i actually in any sort of position of authority. i guess this is a reflection of my inexperience, because these are generally the same things that i found influenced my view of the orchestra as an organization when i myself was in it. the real world is far less organized in the ways that we're made to believe when we're young. of course one would expect some degree of this, but it seems to me that sometimes it is actually just ass-backwards, not just done for mere simplification's sake. i guess this is pretty patently obvious, but sometimes it's surprising the places one comes to this realization.
what forces me to realize this over and over is everything having to do with governing a string section, which is of course something i was worried about way back when as well. but now that i have been through this on so many angles (student, student leader, administrator, judge, conductor) i'm pretty sure that i have a degree of authority on the issue.
i have such a problem with verbosity, it's really starting to actually hinder my e-mail communication because i think people get intimidated by the amount of text i set down. so in a nutshell:
1. seating in bare order of how well the kids do on one audition is dumb. this teaches them and their parents all sorts of wrongheaded things about "chairs" and "levels" and "scores" that never apply in an actual orchestra rehearsal or concert, get people all riled up over nothing, and pigeonhole all the players who can't play anything together in the back of the section where it's hardest to play.
2. on the other hand, there is merit to the idea of seating auditions, since they are premised upon the time-proven generalization that kids generally don't practice unless they are held accountable in some way, and an audition is definitely the easiest way of doing this - and there's no way to make them responsive to the results of an audition unless it is patently clear that their seat is related to how well they do on the audition. one can come up with a sort of seating chart whereby every chair in the orchestra is tied to the numeral "score" the student receives on their audition and the quality is distributed throughout the section in a way which still makes clear who did the best and worst. but this seems quite overprescriptive and micro-manage-y to me.
3. two alternatives:
a. a slightly scaled back version of this extreme dictation would be to simply publish the scores/evaluations - and then to seat them however one wishes in order to achieve an integrated section anyway. essentially the same thing without the headache of having to come up with a seating chart of score numbers.
b. to seat everyone in order of their scores anyway, and during the course of the rehearsal season, mix up the section on a rehearsal basis. less controversial. perhaps more confusing for divisi and such, but i would call this a minor concern.
4. as for seating auditions themselves, and concertmaster auditions for the violins, it makes absolutely no sense to publish the excerpts they will be asked to be play at the audition, in advance of the auditions themselves. i'm not sure who came up with this idea but it is the one currently in practice at this orchestra and it completely defeats the purpose of making the kids practice the music, by ensuring that they pretty much limit their practice to the two or three lines which are asked for. at most, certain pages or movements can be specified in advance, one easily understands why having to practice an entire program to perfection can both dilute the quality of practice and overwhelm a student.
5. concertmaster auditions might have a blind component, but it makes no sense for them to be visible and for seating auditions to be blind. they should include a committee of people (flexible). they should include a solo component. and the excerpts asked for should certainly not be forecast.
6. parents should suck it up and learn that seats - except the first two - don't matter at all.
For today, I have some piano pieces i was fortunate enough to hear live in paris this summer.
i love the way kempff accomplishes these. he takes slow tempi, but they are full of deliberation and conviction. i think everything brahms wanted to come through does so magnificently in his interpretations. there's just a hint of melancholy which keeps it from being virtuosic (the way it sounds when rubinstein, for example, plays them), but for me they don't sink into dirges or anything like that.
in order, the pieces are:
No. 1. Intermezzo in A minor. Allegro non assai, ma molto appassionato
No. 2. Intermezzo in A major. Andante teneramente
No. 3. Ballade in G minor. Allegro energico
No. 4. Intermezzo in F minor. Allegretto un poco agitato
No. 5. Romance in F major. Andante
No. 6. Intermezzo in E flat minor. Andante, largo e mesto
these were written in 1893 and composed for Clara Schumann. there's much to be said for performing them as a set, as the keys not only form a relationship based on the second (Am-AM-Gm-Fm-FM-Ebm), but the secondary key areas for all the middle sections of these pieces are also linked tonally in ways which i won't go into here (a reasonable link discussing these relationships).
i think kempff does a good job of bringing out some motifs that will catch your ear across all six pieces, another reason for performing/listening to these all in a group. the first is grandiose but runs the danger of getting thick. it treats its keys ambiguously in the best of brahmsian fashion, sounding in F Major for the first statement, and only in the developmental middle section does it begin to yearn for an A minor cadence - which it actually only reaches for the first time in the piece at around 1:00. and the piece actually concludes in A Major, the key of the second work.
here i think Brahms does some of his best voicing. as a result the important motifs are pretty much clear as day. my favorite moment in this respect is in the middle section which is in F minor, where you hear the descending motif in the right hand but also augmented in the top notes of the left hand, at the same time (around 1:39 and much more clearly again about 10 seconds later). the result is a lot of parallel sixths ringing out of the texture. the same thing emerges in the latter half of the development section which is more urgent and as a result compressed.
for now my personal favorite is the more lively ballade, no. 3. i enjoy the dovetailing of the left hand accompaniment with the melodic notes in the right. harmonically the most interesting thing is that while the introduction is decisively in g minor (with a second statement in e-flat major), it utilizes g major dominant chords (the V of iv) to gravitate the middle section towards B Major, which isn't really anything in G minor but found by chromatic motion. The same with the brief modulation to D-sharp minor, (enharmonically E-flat minor, but he spells it as the former).
the transition back to g minor involves a move to G Major first, and the same chromatic adjustment to a-flat major, C dominant 7 again, then V-i to minor.
the very last chords are an unusual cadence from VI-i (eb major to g minor, first inversion).
now we find ourselves in f minor, with an unsettled set of triplets that switches from hand to hand. for me the magic happens in the middle section, which is a placid section of held chords which move over a tolling low note in the left hand. when the recap comes it is outspoken rather than muted, and never quite regains its composure until the end of the piece in glistening f major, the key of the next piece.
for me the thing that strikes me immediately about this fifth piece is that even though the tune our ears will gravitate towards is placed in the middle - he knows that we'll notice it because it is the quickest-moving voice, with the nice eighth note pattern coming in later variations - the top voice is to the letter the same as the descending theme in the middle section of the a major intermezzo (no. 2). the middle section, in d major, is fluttering and ethereal. the moment when it plummets into d minor is pretty remarkable, at about 2:33. at the moment before the recap he writes an A-Bb trill which goes up, characteristically and ambiguously, to a C-D trill which suggests C Major, the dominant to F, without ever actually stating it (both the E and G are missing).
the beginning of the sixth piece is the most ambiguous of all, with a dislocated play on Eb-F-Gb which turns out to fit into a fully diminished A7 chord, giving pretty much no indication of where we are now. we settle uneasily into Eb minor about 20 seconds in, but series of thirds and the lack of any real cadence in the tonic key along with the murmuring in the left hand (including plenty of diminished chords) destabilize the tonality. we hit a little detour into D-flat Major/B-flat minor, which take us into the relative major of Gb for the middle section, where it stays for all of three bars before veering into the minor areas of Bb minor.
for me it seems as if the entire piece revolves around the note of Gb, but fitting it into as many different contexts as he can get to. brahms had a thing for the ambiguity of the III, and here i think he pivots around it quite characteristically.
