Ravel: Le Tombeau de Couperin (Milstein, Lortie)

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4 жыл бұрын

Is there any composer whose music expends more craft, on a bar-by-bar basis, than Ravel?
Well, ok, so that isn’t really a sensible or meaningful question, but it’s hard to escape the feeling when you’re actually listening to Ravel that his music is put together with a level of care and precision that no other composer quite matches. Dedicated to 6 friends who died in WWI, Le Tombeau de Couperin is the last set of solo piano works Ravel wrote, as well as the last works he wrote in any “antique” form. Le Tombeau represents a fusion of classical discipline & economy with colouristic imagination of the highest order - each of these pieces could be the subject of a longish essay, and despite my best efforts any description will bust YT’s limit, so I’ve put it in the comments.

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@AshishXiangyiKumar 4 жыл бұрын

Prelude - ABA form [0:00/1:28/2:07]. A vibrant perpetuum mobile whose circling semiquavers only pause once, 5 bars before the close. The 6-note RH Em pentatonic motif that opens the piece is the basis of much of the music - after we first hear it it’s immediately transposed a 5th down into the LH, while the RH plays a turn-like figure (typical of Ravel that this isn’t *quite* a turn, but something a more like a mordent, with a bit more bite) also derived from its first 2 notes. Lovely use of modal colour throughout - the dominant feel is Aeolian (/Dorian at points), but you also dip suddenly into B Mixolydian b6 in m.10 and C Lydian at 1:10 (and similar; note also the hemiola). There’s also washes of chromatic (the ultra-satisfying voice leading in the LH at 0:59) and quintal harmony (1:28), alongside some good old perfect cadences when Ravel wants to provide a bit more resolution (1:21; 2:11 & similar). Fugue - Ridiculously good. Consider how minimalist the subject is - it contains only 4 notes, the Em triad plus an A, and all of them (if you don’t count the gaps) are quavers. And yet the tender fugue that extends out of this meek, almost wrong-footed material perfectly exploits the two features of the subject that _are_ interesting - its slur-to-staccato articulation, and the rhythmic displacement of the theme (it begins off the beat and without any lead-in, with its second half sort of phase-shifted forward by an quaver; notice how this lets the subject slip into the texture almost invisibly). On top of this, you get your first real rhythmic variation with the triplet in the countersubject (which also throws in the Dorian C#), and Ravel clusters the voices closely together to create some gorgeous contrapuntal interplay (two examples of this: the wonderful near-miss dissonance between the G/F# at 3:17; and polyrhythmic interplay of the countersubject stretto at 5:55). The fugue is also packed with familiar fugal techniques: inversions (4:10) stretti (4:50, inversion stretto at 5:02; inversion and original at 5:18, and a particularly close closing stretto at 6:03), false entries (4:34 and similar), and pedal points (4:37 and similar). Forlane - The most harmonically sophisticated work of in the set, in rondo form [ABACADA; episodes are at 8:01; 9:51; 12:06]. The piece opens with a progression of three(!) different augmented chords* in the LH coloured by wry dissonances above, before landing on an E# half-diminished (over A). Then a minor third (B#/A) descends chromatically in the LH, while the bass leaps up in fourths from F# to E. In the meantime the RH picks up the E# introduced in LH in m.3, and slowly nudges it chromatically downward to B in m.5. The construction of the theme’s melody is unusually sly - when the open 5th appears in the bass (m.2) we hear the B#/D# as an enclosure of C#, but that note is delayed and forced to take a rather ragged leap to appear an octave lower than expected. There’s a lot more worth pointing out, but for space’s sake here are just two other highlights: the dissonances in the first episode; and Ravel’s frequent use of octave-span chords which have their lowest note hitched up a semitone (7:02 & similar; 12:33; RH at 12:55, LH at 13:24). [*Kind of fun to note how differently each of these augmented chords work -- the first is a rootless minor major 7th, the second is an E chord with an augmented 5th, and the last feels to me like a weird mix of an A and C# chord.] Rigaudon - One of two pieces in the suite that isn’t in Em. ABA form [13:51/15:14/16:28]. Compared to the Forlane, this can almost sound harmonically conservative, though it features numerous extended chords (the second one you hear is a D13), planing, and sudden modulations to distant keys (e.g. F# in m.24). What’s probably most striking about this Rigaudon is its really weird phrase lengths - in the first 8 bars, there is a 2-bar intro, followed by a 5-bar phrase, and then a standalone closing bar (m.8) which repeats the opening gesture (but without the closing descent). After the repeat sign, oddly, the same standalone bar appears again in m.9 and 16 (in Mixolydian and Bb respectively), giving you a section phrased in 1+5+1+5. And after that, starting from m.23, you get material phrased in 2+4+6+2 (the last two bars are the opening gesture, now repeated in full). One other thing - the piece’s only pedal marking is found at the beginning in the B section and has no release sign, while the B section itself features multiple staccato phrases that would be impossible with a held pedal, so make of that what you will! Menuet - ABA form [17:24/19:21 - Musette/20:30]. A lullaby-like piece filled with gentle dissonances - the opening 2 bars alone are a little masterclass in how to place them. The musette in the middle features some spectacular planing over a G drone (an unusual drone given the section is in Dm and doesn’t really have a Dorian feel). The musette melody starts out in Dm in one hand, becomes shared by two, and then suddenly shifts gear by borrowing various major and minor chords from various unrelated keys (the Ab chord at 19:56 is especially nice) to spell out the melody. A particularly poignant moment is at the return of the menuet (20:30), when the musette unexpectedly continues in the LH. Toccata - sonata form (truncated recapitulation). [Exposition: 22:18, with B theme at 23:11; Development: 23:40; Recap: 25:49, just B theme]. Another gem - starts out tiptoeing around in E Dorian, and basically grows more menacing/grand as the material is developed. Three examples of this: (1) that dancelike figure in m.5, when it’s developed (23:40), becomes darkened not only by a move to Bm, but also tritone leaps in the bass, the use of the minor-ised Neapolitan, and chromatic movement; (2) the wistful B theme at the climax/recap moves into Mixo b6 and takes on a triumphant character; (3) the development theme at 23:48 (itself a development of the transitional material at 23:05) takes on eerie colours with a whole-tone harmonisation at 25:01. There’s also many nice harmonic tricks going on here - e.g., at 25:06 (m.173), the melody is in E Phrygian, but each melodic note is also harmonised with its own dominant 7th chord (E/G/E/F/D/C/A/C); and at 26:13, how an alternating series of Gm/Bb/Am/C chords leads beautifully into the final E chord.

@johnchessant3012 4 жыл бұрын

Ashish Xiangyi Kumar

@wholemilky 4 жыл бұрын

I love reading these, thank you for taking the time of writing them.

@FlorianBriegel 4 жыл бұрын

I wish you could further elaborate on Forlane, as it has such a spicy flair and also is my favourite of the set. However thanks for all the Ravel, I appreciate that besides your wonderful texts/small essays.

@diegoponce5423 4 жыл бұрын

I also want to thank you, though i don't understand like half of this, i Love reading it, so thank you

@tcbiggs9509 4 жыл бұрын

Bravo to the composer, the pianist and the commentary. Thank you for such an insightful view into this magnificent work. I've dabbled with it in the past but have yet to return to it; I'm so much more aware of such things now, and your amazing points will add to my (limited) knowledge of these pieces. This might be just what I needed with Ravel. Thank you so very much.