The two Piano Concerti by Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) are among the most significant works in the genre. First turning to the concerto genre as late in his artistic career as 1929-1931, Ravel was drawn by the search for various possible resolutions within one and the same genre. He worked on both concerti at the same time. Ravel found this to be particularly interesting.
Returning home from the USA, Ravel had the idea of writing a concert piece on Basque themes. It is important to point out the composer’s constantly changing plans with regard to the composition of his emergent concerto. It is know, for example, that at first he proposed to complete the concerto with pianissimo and trills, while in fact it ends with forte and octaves. The composer himself said of his First Concerto in G Major that “This is a concerto in the true meaning of the word, in the spirit of the concerti by Mozart or Saint-Saлns.” According to Ravel, the music in a work of this genre “may be merry and dazzling; but it is not a necessity that it must claim depth or drama.”
The music of the second section of the concerto, Adagio, enchants us with its somewhat cool beauty. The inspired melody conjures up associations with baroque examples of Bach’s music (although the composer indicated another “model” – that of Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet). At the same time, the music in this section is an example of rare economy of means, and it would appear that there is nothing of the concerto in it – the style is so miserly and deviations from the slow development of the music are rare.
The pinnacle of Ravel’s pre-war career and one of his most significant works ever came with the ballet Daphnis et Chloé,
based on a Greek legend about the innocent lives and loves of shepherds
in the open air. Ravel himself wrote of the ballet: “In this work
I planned to create a huge musical fresco where I strove not so much to
recreate genuine antiquity as to create an impression of the Ellada of
my dreams, close to the idea of Ancient Greece embodied in works by
French writers and poets of the late 18th century.”
Later,
the composer was to form two orchestral suites from the ballet music.
It is the second suite, composed in 1912, that is the most popular, and
it is based on the final three numbers of the ballet: No 10 (Lever du jour), No 11 (Pantomime) and No 12 (Danse générale).
The music of the suite begins with a scene of the rising sun. Conjuring
up an incredibly rich range of sensations for the listener, Ravel
depicts the colours and scents of dawn through sound. Then the dark
languor transforms into a slow, bewitching oriental dance. The suite
concludes with a general dance – a hymn to light and life: the twisting
theme wallows in the chirring, rustling and pulsating sounds.
Gustav Mahler’s Tenth Symphony was his last work, and it remained unfinished. The composer was working on it in 1910 in a state of extreme despair. The vast symphonic canvas (which lasts almost one and a half hours) was conceived in five movements with a symmetrical structure. The outer movements are slow, both of them of tremendous length. The second and fourth movements are scherzos, while in the middle comes the movement entitled Purgatorio.
Before he died in 1911, Mahler had succeeded in completing and orchestrating only the first and third movements while the others remained in the form of un-orchestrated sketches. In the last century many attempts were made to complete the Tenth Symphony. The first section, completed by Mahler, is often performed as an independent work (because of its unique scale it can stand alone), while among versions by performers the most popular is that of Deryck Cooke, first performed in London on 13 August 1964.
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