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MAURICE RAVEL (1875–1937)
ERNEST BLOCH (1880–1959)
Berceuse sur le nom de Gabriel Fauré
Nuit exotique
This is in the long tradition of turning a name into its musical equivalents and basing a piece on it. Liszt had written a fugue on the name of Bach, and Ravel also wrote a minuet on the name of Haydn.
Ravel’s somnolent cradle song is similar to Fauré’s own ingenuous Dolly Suite theme of 1896, with the same innocently rocking children’s music-box melody.
The violin uses a mute to muffle itself, removing the theme further from notice and pushing it back into the dim nostalgic haze of childhood, as unassuming as Fauré himself. The gentler, lyric Ravel here acknowledges how much he owed his teacher, Fauré.
MAURICE RAVEL
Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1 (Posthumous)
This is the lesser known of Ravel’s two violin sonatas, and the first written, though it wasn't published until 1975, long after his death. The piece has only one movement, but a letter by Ravel mentions that he planned more before abandoning the sonata.
Ravel wrote the movement in 1897, around the time he enrolled in the Paris Conservatory as a composition student, two years after dropping out as a piano student. It is in a traditional sonata form—exposition, development, and recapitulation—but already shows Ravel’s distinctive color palette and knack for explorative melody. In this piece, you can hear the young Ravel as his teachers heard him: this was the kind of music that convinced Gabriel Fauré of his student’s promise.
— Benjamin Pesetsky
Bloch was born in Geneva and studied with the great violinist Eugène Ysaÿe, giving him the understanding of the limits of the violin, and filling his later compositions with immense technical demands.
Bloch became an American citizen in 1924 and taught George Antheil and Roger Sessions, both of whom went on to shape American music. He taught at Mannes and was briefly director of the Cleveland Institute of Music and the San Francisco Conservatory, and in later years was at University of California, Berkeley.
This rarely heard piece is similar to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, and is strongly connected to Bartók’s Night Music, where an atmosphere of hushed expectation and vast open space is filled with imitations of birdsong and sporadic croaking of frogs and cicadas, which Milan Kundera called “melodic motives of a rare strangeness.” Bartók, Debussy, and Ravel all experimented with the concept of evoking nature through mood, rather than with specific notes.
They and Bloch sometimes used notes as a jumping-off point to effects and moods, rather than traditional struc- tural note-based melodies, a philosophy which Caroline Goulding has brought to scale in her onomatopoetic techniques, moving beyond standard intonations into an attempt not to imitate nature, but to be the insects and birds the notes only suggest. Notes are an imperfect translation of essences beyond their shadows, as words can only hint at the ideas that summon them.
Bartók was inspired by summer nights at his sister’s estate in Békés county in the Great Hungarian Plain, Nagy Alföld. He felt that only Slovakian folk songs could convey such surroundings, that only the people who lived in nature and sang of it were in touch with its moods, with the way it changed human nature. This is especially relevant at Tippet Rise, where days and nights are swept with mysteries, with
2018 Summer Season 105