France hears unknown work by Ravel
NewsAt 20:00 on France Musique, Louis Langrée will conducts Les Siècles and the choir of Radio France from Montpellier in a score by Maurice Ravel, acquired last year by the Bibliothèque nationale.
Chanson galante, based on a poem by Armand Silvestre, dates from the turn of the 20th century. The chorus, wordless, is used as an additional instrument.
Lucky France. It’s difficult to imagine something like this going ahead in the UK these days. But then again, the UK never had any composers as brilliant as Ravel.
Really? So you think Purcell, Britten, RVW, Bax, Simpson, Ades etc., are all inadequate in some way. That says more about you than them.
Maybe Britten and Ades come close, but none of the others.
I find Ralph Vaughn Williams quite appealing.
Vaughan Williams studied with Ravel. How many of Ravel’s French contemporaries are familiar to French music lovers?
Bizet/Offenbach/Saint-Saens
Those aren’t exactly contemporaries, but Debussy certainly qualifies. And there are numerous others that should be familiar, even if they aren’t.
I think he meant in terms of worldwide popularity. Only UK composer worth mentioning is Elgar. Tallis, Purcell, Britten, Ades are respectable but hardly ‘popular’ the world over.
Arne, Shield are just two wonderful British classical composers. You could add immigrants like J. C. Bach, and J. L. Dussek. But musical standards were lower than in France or Prague. Britten is nowhere near Ravel in stature. Walton is greater than Britten. Bax is very intriguing, at least equal to Britten.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9wHFCXuCsg
Perhaps Purcell and Britten. Not without some successes, but the others are all second stringers in the musical cosmos.
Byrd and Tallis? Fayrfax? Weelkes? Dunstaple? Ok, RVW for sure not.
Who are they? That simple question says it all, really.
Cher Plus belle voix,
Avec respect, je suis entièrement d’accord.
Ravel disagreed with you. OF RVW he ‘he is the only one of my pupils who does not write my music.”
British composers get their lost music heard too, even if JB claims he can’t “imagine” it.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2335262/Elgar-Lost-work-heard-time-songs-written-120-years-ago-make-premiere-deciphered-scribbled-inside-notebook.html
Absurd troll comment by JB for the troll purpose of inserting negativity into a positive event.
I keep listening in loops to Forest by Judith Weir. Don’t say you don’t have composers (and tired that we don’t hear enough living composers-from any country)
I’m listening now – the chorus are singing the words by Silvestre. They will be wordless later in Daphnis Suite No.2.
It’s rather charming on first hearing – about 3 mins long. Similar in style (albeit in a major key) to the choral version of the Fauré Pavane.
Always nice to have another work by the composer who (in my opinion) produced a smaller % of duds than pretty much any other….
Ravel worked and polished on his works endlessly and only proceeded ‘drop by drop’ as he told himself, lacking the spontaneous brush of composers like Berlioz or Wagner. In spite of this, or thanks to this, almost every piece is a masterpiece and part of the repertoire, sounding as fresh and expressive as if written only this morning.
Except for Bolero, that is. Pre-electronic sound art, that is.
Bolero was a mere ballet music exercise commission at a time he had no musical ideas at all, as he himself claimed. He admitted that there was ‘no music in it’ and was stunned & embarrassed that it got so popular. He could not get into a brasserie or the band began to play it, till he asked them to stop it.
I once heard that someone bet Ravel that he would never be able to write a piece of music that would be 15 mins long in the same key, and yet make it interesting.
Structurally speaking, there are only 2 melodies in the Bolero: the first starts on a C, the second a Bb. These 2 sections are repeated 5 times. The whole work is an enormous crescendo.
A truly unique composition which became a hit in his day, even though it has “no music”!
Of course Ravel was exaggerating. It is a brilliant piece, but not very expressive, it’s about the crescendo and the orchestral colours. I think as ballet music it succeeds extremely well.
I sense a bit of animosity in the discussion about English and French composers.
Who cares about nationalities? As long as the compositions themselves stand the test of time and are universally acclaimed,… that’s all that matters in the end.
Let’s not forget that when a composer dies, he turns into music and lives on in our ears and hearts.
Beautiful final sentence. And true.
Nationality is culture, and classical music is culture. You cannot separate it from its origin. Deracinated music is demusic-ed music.
The idea that music is in the first place a product of national culture only emerged in the 19th century. Before that, music was international, composers learning from anything they could get their hands on.
…which may be be the reason for the dearth of viable new music these days.
No that is the result of 20C modernism. It broke a long tradition of invention and skills.
the essences of great composers never dies….their essences (i.e. souls) live on in the music they created while here…..creativity creates immortality……
You mean to tell me that the big box from Warner with the “Complete” music by Ravel isn’t so complete after all? Not that I’m complaining; anything by Ravel is worthy of attention.
PS: I just found out that François-Xavier Roth was originally scheduled to conduct. Bad karma.
With the amount of horse-trading in the classical music world (mafia…), there is plenty of bad karma to go around.
I listened. It was very pleasant.
It’s a beautiful work, as fine as anything else by Ravel. Very compatible with the music of Faure. We have much to be grateful for in M. Ravel’s existence. Why it wasn’t premiered by the top orchestra in France is a mystery.
‘Les Siècles’ is an orchestra who is regularly praised for the high quality of their interpretations, particularity of the French repertoire (see for example the numerous prizes awarded to the recordings of works by Ravel, Debussy, Berlioz…)
So, the fact that this ‘unheard’ work could be heard for the first time on period instruments from the composer’s time doesn’t seem that irrelevant.
Anyway, the piece and its performance material has been published (by Salabert), so any other major orchestra can propose its interpretation now.
Who cares? There is enough music already. We don’t need anything new, even if Ravel wrote it.
What a narrow-minded, blasé, spoiled, and bourgeois comment this is.
Of the best music, there cannot be enough and in fact there is not enough. Hence the search for masterpieces in early music (often with success) or forgotten pieces by the great.
The Sohy piece is fine, first I’ve heard of her. A predecessor to Tailleferre. I can’t wait to hear the Faure concerto.
Whoever might find some sort of genuine interest in imaginary “Music Olympic Games” and personally determined hierarchy-based Composers competitions, is kindly and respectuflly asked to do that at their leisure, keeping it in personal privacy.
No true Respect for Music, Composers and Performances may Deepen nor Enrich by the kind of “games” seen here in some comments.
A great artist,his life cut short, he had more to give.
Indeed. A very sad interruption.
If he had smoked less (or not at all), aten less red beef and more vegetables and fruit, and had not drunk, and had not suffered from depression after WW I (which he should never had entered as a medical aid and driver), and if had not had a mother complex, he could have lived much longer.