Piano Concerto in G

In the 1920s, French composer Maurice Ravel set out to write a piano concerto for himself. For many years, he had preferred to play relatively easy pieces in his public appearances as a concert pianist, since he was all too conscious that his playing technique was not up to the challenge of the more demanding works he’d created.

But, as he began creating the new work for piano and orchestra, he was inspired to compose a concerto of proper difficulty. And he convinced himself that he could develop the required technique with diligent practice. Thus, his long composition hours were interspersed with hours devoted to practicing scales and études by Czerny and Chopin in what was ultimately a fruitless attempt, at the age of 55, to perfect his piano skills.

It was only once the G-major Concerto was finished, late in 1931, with a premiere barely weeks away, that Ravel abandoned his soloist’s aspirations and turned to Marguerite Long, who had premiered his Le Tombeau de Couperin in 1917, to give the first performance instead. The composer instead resigned himself to the conductor’s baton.

But from where did the musical ideas for Ravel’s concerto come? Writer and composer Gustave Samazeuilh recounted that in 1911, he and Ravel spent a holiday in the Basque region of Spain (where both had roots) and that Ravel sketched a “Basque Concerto” for piano and orchestra. Without the right idea for a central linking movement, Ravel abandoned the work only to bring parts of it back to life 20 years later with the G-major Concerto. Meanwhile, livelier themes emerged from Ravel’s preoccupation with the brilliant percussive qualities of the piano itself and languorous melodies emerge from his admiration for the new language of jazz.

The sound of this concerto bears striking differences from that of its sibling, the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, well beyond the doubling of fingers on the keyboard. In the G-major Concerto, Ravel concentrated the soloistic activity to the upper reaches of the keyboard. He also utilized a smaller orchestra, more an ensemble of soloists than the grand tutti of a full orchestra, which may account for Ravel’s assertion that he composed the G-major Concerto in the spirit of Mozart and Saint-Saëns, two composers of impeccably Classical pedigree.

The three movements are accordingly laid out in a Classical plan, with two fast movements embracing a slow middle one. The first movement offers both quick and slow sections, the latter being the occasion for some virtuosic melodic flights for solo instruments — notably the bassoon, harp, and horn — while the piano is often required to be sweet in one hand and more directed in the other at the same time. (The blues scales often associated with the music of Gershwin, whom Ravel had met in 1924, is much in evidence.)

Ravel cryptically spoke of writing the slow middle movement “one bar at a time.” He also referred to Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet as a basis (which is scarcely less mysterious, aside from the fact that melody-with-accompaniment is prominent in both works). The music itself is pure, both in the simplicity of the piano style and the absence of chromaticism. There is also a constant suggestion of “wrong” notes (in the manner of Satie), the wrongness in Ravel’s case being supremely calculated and proving to be exactly right. Simplicity gives way to complexity, and the melody returns in the English horn as the piano’s exquisite tracery continues to the end.

The last movement is an unstoppable cascade, with the orchestra tested to the limit, not just the soloist. The movement is neatly framed, with its opening clustered discords returning as a signing-off at the end.

— 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.