RAVEL, DEBUSSY & MILHAUD Thursday 5 November 2020, The Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh –––––
PROGRAMME NOTE
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PERFORMERS VIOLIN Maria WÅ‚oszczowska Kana Kawashima VIOLA Felix Tanner CELLO Philip Higham PIANO Peter Evans
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WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR Ravel (1875-1937) Violin Sonata No 2 (1923–27)
––––– Highbrow or lowbrow, classical or popular: in truth, there’s always been a hazy line between musical styles seen as ‘high’ or ‘low’. Bach composed and performed to entertain listeners in a Leipzig coffee house; both Bartók and Vaughan Williams immersed themselves in their respective countries’ folk music; Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür played for years in one of the country’s most popular rock bands.
Allegretto Blues: Moderato Perpetuum mobile: Allegro
Debussy (1862–1918) Sonata for Cello and Piano (1915) Prologue: Lent, sostenuto e molto risoluto Sérénade: Modérément animé Final: Animé, léger et nerveux
And as soon as new-fangled jazz started to become seriously popular – though by no means reputable – in 1920s America, European composers pricked up their ears. Particularly (though not exclusively) those in Paris, whose own artful, playful sophistication – drawing on the music hall and circus as much as the opera house and concert hall – found a friendly playmate in the louche, raucous music emanating from jazz bands across the Atlantic.
Milhaud (1892–1974) La Création du monde, Op 81a (1923) Prélude Fugue Romance Scherzo Final
Maurice Ravel first incorporated jazz into his music in his Violin Sonata (strictly speaking, it’s his Second Violin Sonata, but the First is a student work of which he only completed the first movement). He encountered this exciting new American music in Paris, but toured America in 1928 – the year after he completed the Sonata – where he met George Gershwin, Paul Whiteman and Bix Beiderbecke. That same year, he wrote an article for periodical The Musical Digest called ‘Take Jazz Seriously!’, expressing surprise that the style was considered so disreputable in the USA: ‘Abroad we take jazz seriously. It is influencing our work. The 'Blues' in my Sonata, for example, is stylised jazz, more French than American in character perhaps, but nevertheless influenced strongly by your so-called 'popular music.'’
Ravel intentionally avoids a smooth, blended sound between his instruments, opting instead to let the violin and piano exert their distinct and separate identities, to the extent that they sometimes seem to be doing two entirely separate things Joseph Maurice Ravel
He’d go on to embed jazz elements more deeply into later works including his two piano concertos and his opera L’enfant et les sortilèges. In his Violin Sonata, as Ravel explained, jazz influences are clearest in the work’s second movement ‘Blues’, in which the violin swoops and slides its way through a convincing blues song, while the piano accompanies with sometimes banjo-like figurations.
instruments, that [in the Sonata] not only do not sink their differences, but accentuate their incompatibility to an even greater degree". Accordingly, Ravel intentionally avoids a smooth, blended sound between his instruments, opting instead to let the violin and piano exert their distinct and separate identities, to the extent that they sometimes seem to be doing two entirely separate things.
But Ravel laboured over his relatively brief Violin Sonata for four years, from 1923 to 1927 (during which time he managed to complete the whole of an entirely separate piece for violin and piano, Tzigane). There was no doubt a question of his usual fastidiousness, and of melding his somewhat disparate elements into a convincing whole. But perhaps what consumed Ravel’s thoughts for so long was his realisation that the violin and piano
Just take the very opening of the first movement. The piano begins with a gently flowing, wistful melody, but when the violin takes it over, the piano suddenly changes to a mischievous, somewhat jazzy figuration in the left hand that seems intent on destabilising things. It’s a figuration that comes back again and again throughout the piece, including in its helter-skelter finale, where Ravel sends his violinist dashing up and down the fingerboard in feats of dizzying virtuosity while the pianist seems content to have the
are, in his words, "essentially incompatible
main melodic material.
undertook a gruelling operation in 1915 that left him unable to compose for several months. When he did feel able to write music again, it was to embark on a project he’d planned since 1914, comprising six sonatas ‘for various instruments’, as he described them. His Cello Sonata came first, followed by his Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp, and his Violin Sonata. Following his death in 1918, he left unstarted a planned Sonata for Oboe, Horn and Harpsichord, a Sonata for Trumpet, Clarinet, Bassoon and Piano, and a final Sonata bringing together all the instruments from the previous works as a miniature orchestra. Claude Debussy
Claude Debussy had dabbled with influences from jazz – or at least ragtime – earlier in his career, in piano pieces such as the ‘Golliwog’s Cake Walk’ from Children’s Corner, or even ‘General Lavine – Eccentric’ and ‘Mistrels’ from his Préludes. But by the time he came to compose his Cello Sonata, in 1915, jazz was far from his mind. Instead, Debussy’s thoughts were occupied with the illustrious history of French music, notably Couperin and Rameau, and the precision and clarity that their music achieved. There was an undeniably nationalistic slant to his thinking, too, in celebrating the achievements of French culture at a time of war and threat from Germany. Debussy wrote: "I want to work not so much for myself, but to give proof, however small it may be, that not even 30 million 'Boches' can destroy French thought."
Debussy’s Cello Sonata sounds a world away from the luxuriant opulence of much of his orchestral music. Here, his style is precise, to the point, somewhat austere and unusually emotionally exposed. He’s also remarkably concentrated in his utterances – the whole Sonata runs to barely 12 minutes – so that he can sometimes appear to move on to a new musical idea before you’ve fully absorbed the previous one.
It was a difficult period for the composer personally, too. He’d first been diagnosed
His first movement begins with a melancholy, austere fanfare in the piano, before the two players embark on a dreamy conversation, full of ornamental filigree that seems to directly draw on Baroque keyboard music. Debussy’s extensive use of pizzicato in his rhapsodic second movement raised a few eyebrows at the Sonata’s early performances, as did the movement’s unusual, hard-to-place harmonies. He closes with a breathless dash of a finale, full of switchback turns into curious byways, and closing with a surprisingly bold, brittle return to the
with colorectal cancer in 1909, and
austerity of the Sonata’s opening.
in 1923, with a story by Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars based loosely on pseudo-African creation myths, and a set by cubist painter Fernand Léger. Milhaud’s jazzy score proved so popular that he himself created a new version for piano quintet – the Suite de concert you hear today – to satisfy public demand for the music.
Darius Milhaud
Darius Milhaud heard his first live jazz in London in 1920, at a concert played by Billy Arnold’s Novelty Jazz Band. He promptly voyaged to New York to check out the new musical style for himself, touring the dance halls and speakeasies of Harlem to do so. When he arrived back in Paris, he discovered to his surprise that jazz had beaten him to it, and was already immensely popular in the French capital, led by the provocative singer and dancer Josephine Baker.
Milhaud’s original ballet score tells of three African gods conjuring trees, animals and humans into being with their magical spells, and concludes with an Adam and Eve-like duo left on stage to mark the beginnings of civilisation. Things get a little mixed up in Milhaud’s Suite de concert, but the basic framework of the story remains. It opens in Bachian style with a somewhat tense, melancholy Prélude followed by a bright and sassy Fugue, before a bluesy, Gershwin-esque Romance and a sprightly Scherzo. Milhaud brings his earlier elements together in his concluding Final, which generates its own earworm of a jazzy riff, with plenty of pizzicato providing percussive punctuation.
He wrote La création du monde for a
Leonard Bernstein – no stranger himself to mixing jazz and classical styles – later summed up Milhaud’s ballet score succinctly: "The Creation of the World emerges not as a flirtation, but as a real love affair with jazz." It was a love affair, indeed, that lasted Milhaud’s whole life, and was to bring interpenetrating influences full circle. Following the Nazi invasion of France in 1940, Milhaud fled to America. He later taught at Mills College in Oakland and the Music Academy of the West in Montecito, both in California. There, two of his most famous students were Dave Brubeck and Burt Bacharach.
production by the Ballet Suédois in Paris
© David Kettle
But it didn’t dent the composer’s enduring love for the style. He’d already made a name for himself as a member of loose composer collective Les Six, who aimed to sweep away the pastel-hued lyricism of impressionism and replace it with something altogether wittier, brighter and more sophisticated. In jazz, Milhaud found the ideal source material.
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