Ravel Gaspard de la Nuit: Le Gibet; Jeffrey Chappell, pianist

From the March 31, 2015 recital at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland. "Gaspard de la Nuit" translates as "Keeper of the Treasures of the Night" and is the title of a collection of prose-poems by the French author Aloysius Bertrand, whose writing was influenced by that of Edgar Allen Poe. Ravel took three of these prose-poems and used them as inspiration, giving the resulting piece the subtitle of "Three Poems for Piano". "Le Gibet" ("The Scaffold") consists of a series of grisly questions about the sound that is heard in the vicinity of a hanged man: is it a fly buzzing around the man's deaf ears; or perhaps a spider spinning a cravat around the strangled neck; etc.? The answer is that it is the sound of a bell tolling from the walls of a city below the horizon. This bell is represented by Ravel as the note B flat, which sounds continuously through 6 minutes of music as he reharmonizes it over and over again in a display of compositional virtuosity.