Yuja Wang Plays Ravel

Like many composers, Maurice Ravel was a highly competent pianist who frequently performed his own music. Thus, it is not entirely surprising that he should want to write a piano concerto; what is surprising, though, is that it took him so long to do so — and when he did, he ended up writing two at the same time.

Ravel first began drafting a concerto based on Basque themes around the time he was 30, but World War I soon intervened, and Ravel enlisted for military duty. It wasn’t until 1928, after his American tour (which included time in Cleveland, where he conducted his own works with The Cleveland Orchestra), that Ravel began to work on a concerto again.

Work on that score, the Piano Concerto in G major, was interrupted, however, by a request for a left-hand concerto from pianist Paul Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein had lost his right hand to amputation in World War I and had resumed his career by commissioning left-handed works from many of the era’s best-known composers, including Richard Strauss, Prokofiev, Korngold, and Britten. The concerto was composed quickly, allowing Ravel to return to the two-handed, G-major Concerto, and premiered in 1932 with Wittgenstein as soloist. In the end, Wittgenstein preferred most of the other pieces he commissioned to Ravel’s concerto, unable to recognize its mastery.

The Concerto for the Left Hand includes many jazz touches. Ravel had been interested in this American art form since the early 1920s, when it first became the rage in the Parisian clubs he frequented. His enthusiasm grew during his 1928 visit to the United States. At a party given in New York in honor of his 53rd birthday, Ravel met George Gershwin, whose Rhapsody in Blue he was very fond of. Gershwin asked Ravel to take him on as a pupil, but Ravel declined, saying, “You would only lose the spontaneous quality of your melodies and end up writing bad Ravel.”

In addition to its jazzy elements, the work projects an overall gloominess to its sound. Dark colors predominate, namely in the opening with its unusual solo for contrabassoon. It is quite possible that Ravel’s encounter with Wittgenstein brought back some of his own war memories. Ravel expert Arbie Orenstein sees the Concerto for the Left Hand as “a culmination of Ravel’s longstanding preoccupation, one might say obsession, with the notion of death.” It is certain that this concerto is a deeply tragic work — in stark contrast to its companion piece, the G-major Concerto — and perhaps the simple fact that he was creating the two concertos simultaneously allowed Ravel to take them in two very different directions.

Ravel gave the following formal outline of this work:

The concerto is divided into two parts which are played without pause. It begins with a slow introduction, which stands in contrast to the powerful entrance of theme one; this theme will later be offset by a second idea, marked ‘espressivo,’ which is treated pianistically as though written for two hands, with an accompaniment figure weaving about the melodic line.

The second part is a scherzo based upon two rhythmic figures. A new element suddenly appears in the middle, a sort of ostinato figure extending over several measures which are indefinitely repeated but constantly varied in their underlying harmony, and over which innumerable rhythmic patterns are introduced which become increasingly compact. This pulsation increases in intensity and frequency, and following a return of the scherzo, it leads to an expanded reprise of the initial theme of the work and finally to a long cadenza, in which the theme of the introduction and the various elements noted in the beginning of the concerto contend with one another until they are brusquely interrupted by a brutal conclusion.

— adapted from a note by Peter Laki

Peter Laki is a musicologist and frequent lecturer on classical music. He is a visiting associate professor of music, emeritus, at Bard College and was The Cleveland Orchestra’s program annotator from 1990 to 2007.

Discover more about Ravel’s visit to Cleveland with our Stories from the Archives.

The Hungarian composer György Ligeti’s music in the 1960s and ’70s established him as a leader of the European avant-garde — in succession to such figures as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose music represented the first wave of postwar innovation.

Fleeing Hungary after the 1956 uprising, Ligeti settled in Vienna and absorbed all the newest music he could, always aiming to be free of prevailing orthodoxies. The most distinctive feature of his first successful pieces was “micropolyphony,” a dense texture generated by many strands too intricate to be heard individually, yet combining to produce a texture of great richness. Apparitions (1959) and Atmosphères (1961) are examples of this style. At the same time, he adopted stylistic elements from his compatriot Béla Bartók and was always interested in folk music of all kinds.

In 1969, the American conductor Mario di Bonaventura programmed Ligeti’s Cello Concerto at the Congregation of the Arts Festival at Dartmouth College, of which he was the director, and offered Ligeti a commission to compose a piano concerto to be played by his brother Anthony, professor of music at Boston University. No deadline was set, in part because the composer was deeply involved in creating his “anti-opera” Le Grand Macabre, eventually performed in Stockholm in 1978.

Although Ligeti jotted down some ideas for the Piano Concerto in 1980, he made little real progress. He later said he had made “hundreds of attempts” to compose the concerto’s first page, pointing to a sprawling pile of manuscripts underneath his piano. So, he set it aside to work out some ideas on rhythm, mainly in a series of Études for piano. He took up the concerto again in 1985, completed three movements for a hearing in 1986, and wrote two additional movements for the premiere of the completed work in 1988. The soloist and conductor for both performances were the di Bonaventura brothers, as originally intended, and it was to Mario that the work was dedicated.

Ligeti’s aim in this music was to control separate levels of sound. In his busiest music, different rhythmic strands are clearly heard, but they do not relate audibly to one another or to the conductor’s beat, at least at first. From the listener’s point of view, the conductor can be seen giving a regular pulse, although the events in the music rarely, if ever, coincide with that beat. The accumulation of notes, in Ligeti’s argument, is a special application of Chaos Theory — though there is complex “chaos” throughout, patterns do eventually emerge from within. This is exceedingly difficult music for the soloist as well as the orchestra to play, and, despite appearances, very difficult for the conductor also.

The pianist is accompanied by a small orchestra (single winds and no timpani) with an immense variety of percussion and “street sounds” such as the slide whistle and ocarina. The first movement keeps the pianist busy, with a solo part that could be by Bartók were it not for the orchestra’s seemingly random intrusions. Folklike tunes with lopsided rhythms are heard from time to time.

The second movement is the longest, being in essence a lament, with many drooping, mournful phrases, as in the opening piccolo solo over a bass drone. The plaintive mood is gradually destroyed by several short, fierce entries and an accumulating sense of crisis. The scream of high-pitched whistles and a climactic siren bring it to a nightmarish conclusion, with the unexpected sound of a harmonica appearing from seemingly nowhere.

The third movement is a scherzo, reminiscent of Bartók’s “night music” near the start and of Messiaen’s forestful of birds later on.

The fourth movement is more enigmatic, with clearer textures interspersed with silences. Ligeti applied the mathematical concept of fractals in devising some of the rhythmic elements of this movement. (As the story goes, he was also amused to be told that some listeners could hear fragments of “Happy Birthday to You” in this movement.)

The fifth movement is the shortest of the concerto, beginning with a piano cadenza that quickly gives way to fairy-like music brimming with scales that reach up to the sky. The work concludes with a race to the finish between piano and xylophone, punctuated by the click of a woodblock.

This is music of astonishing complexity, but is also unmistakably exciting and brilliant. It was a breath of fresh air when it appeared in the 1980s and was widely embraced and imitated by younger composers.

— Hugh Macdonald

Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year.

“What a terrible blow!” exclaimed Modest Mussorgsky in a letter to the critic Vladimir Stasov in 1874. He then proceeded to paraphrase a famous passage from Shakespeare’s King Lear: “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, live on, when creatures like Hartmann must die?”

Viktor Hartmann, a gifted architect and painter and a close friend of Mussorgsky’s, had recently died at age 39. A commemorative exhibit of his paintings inspired Mussorgsky to pay musical tribute to his friend — a piano suite based on the composer’s impressions of the paintings. The suite was not performed or published during the composer’s lifetime, and it did not become widely known until Maurice Ravel orchestrated it in 1922. What’s more, originally written for piano, Pictures at an Exhibition did not become a regular part of the piano repertoire until the middle of the 20th century, after it had already been popularized by symphony orchestras.

From its conception, the original piece cried out for orchestration, partly because its piano writing was not idiomatic — Mussorgsky did not have the gift that composers such as Robert Schumann, Chopin, or Liszt had for creating music that fits the instrument so perfectly. But mostly because its sharply profiled and contrasting musical characteristics could be underscored to great effect when set for full orchestra. Other composers had already orchestrated it, but Ravel’s version enchanted the world.

In his piano cycle, Mussorgsky composed musical illustrations of 10 of Hartmann’s pictures. The pictures are connected — in the first half of the work, at any rate — by a “Promenade,” which depicts a visitor strolling through the gallery, from picture to picture. With each passing image, this melody changes as if the impression left by the last picture lingers as the visitor proceeds to the next painting.

The first picture, Gnomus, shows a toy nutcracker in the shape of a dwarf. The strange and unpredictable movements of this creature are depicted vividly. Then we hear the “Promenade” and are ushered into Il vecchio castello (The Old Castle), where a troubadour voices a wistful song in a medieval court. In Ravel’s orchestration, this haunting melody is played by the alto saxophone.

The next picture — preceded again by the “Promenade” — is Tuileries and depicts rowdy children fooling around in Paris’s famous gardens. It is followed immediately by Bydlo, a Polish oxcart, slowly approaching and then driving away as its ponderous melody crescendos before fading out.

A more lyrical but shorter “Prome­nade” leads into the Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks in Their Shells. This scene is based on Hartmann’s designs for the ballet Trilbi at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. In the ballet, a group of children appeared dressed as canaries; others were said to have been “enclosed in eggs as in suits of armor,” with their legs sticking out of the eggshells.

The next picture is titled Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle. Hartmann had painted a number of characters from the Jewish ghetto in Sandomierz, Poland, and this movement is believed to represent an argument between a rich man and a poor one. The rich man, Goldenberg, is represented by a slow-moving unison melody stressing the augmented second (an interval used in certain forms of Jewish chant and folk music). The poor man, Schmuÿle, is characterized by a plaintive theme whose repeated notes seem to choke up with emotion. When the two themes are played simultaneously, Goldenberg’s commands the entire string section, while Schmuÿle’s is intoned by a single muted trumpet.

Limoges: The Market portrays the hustle and bustle of an open-air market in France where people are busy gossiping and quarrelling. Mussorgsky’s original manuscript contained a more detailed program which, although crossed out by the composer, provides amusing context:

The big news: Monsieur de Puissangeot has just recovered his cow ‘Fugitive.’ But the good wives of Limoges are not interested in this incident because Madame de Remboursac has acquired very fine porcelain dentures, while Monsieur de Panta-Pantaléon is still troubled by his obtrusive nose that remains as red as a peony.

What a contrast to immediately go from this bustling market to the Catacombs. Hartmann’s watercolor shows the artist, a friend, and their guide examining the underground burial chambers in Paris. On the right, one can see a large pile of skulls which, in Mussorgsky’s imagination, suddenly begins to glow. When the “Promenade” theme appears next, it is completely transfigured, and an inscription in the score reads: Cum mortuis in lingua mortua (With the dead in a dead language).

The next section, The Hut on Fowl’s Legs (Baba Yaga), evokes the witch of Russian folk tales. According to legend, Baba Yaga flies through the woods in a giant mortar, luring children into her hut before eating them. Hartmann designed a clock in the form of the famous hut; it survives only as a sketch. Mussorgsky’s movement — whose rhythm recalls the ticking of a giant clock — has a mysterious-sounding middle section, after which the wilder and louder first material returns.

The “witch music” continues directly into the grand finale, The Great Gate of Kiev (spelled in the Anglicized form of its Russian name instead of the now-preferred Ukrainian spelling “Kyiv”). This movement was inspired by an ambitious design Hartmann submitted to a competition — and won — but it was never realized. To depict this immense architectural structure, Mussorgsky wrote a grandiose melody resembling a church hymn and set it in rich harmonies. This theme alternates with a more subdued second melody, harmonized like a chorale. Near the end, the “Promenade” theme is heard, leading directly into the magnificent final climax.

— Peter Laki

Peter Laki is a musicologist and frequent lecturer on classical music. He is a visiting associate professor of music, emeritus, at Bard College and was The Cleveland Orchestra’s program annotator from 1990 to 2007.