Ravel: Ma mere l'Oye, I. Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty

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.