Berlioz. Mozart. Ravel

“In 1928, at the request of Monsieur Rubinstein, I composed my Boléro for orchestra. It is a dance in a very measured tempo, changing neither melodically, harmoniously nor rhythmically, and yet the rhythm is constantly marked by the beating of the drum. The only element of variety comes with the orchestral crescendo,” Maurice Ravel wrote twenty years later in his Esquisse autobiographique.
Valentin Serov, who painted a well-known portrait of Ida Rubinstein after falling under the spell of her interpretation of the roles of Cleopatra and Schéhérazade with Diaghilev’s company, said that “Egypt and Assyria themselves somehow came back to life with this extraordinary woman.” This time too she enchanted the audience, naturally sharing the glory with the composer and Alexandre Benois who had designed the sets. Here are the words of one person who attended the premiere on 28 November 1928 at the Opéra de Paris together with a performance of La Valse, another of Maurice Ravel’s poèmes symphoniques: “A dimly lit room in a Spanish taverna; along the walls, in the darkness, revellers chatting at the tables; there is a large table in the middle of the room and a dancer begins to dance upon it... The revellers pay her no attention, though gradually they begin to listen and come to life. Slowly they are seized by the obsessive rhythm; they rise and approach the table; stunned, they surround the dancer who ends her performance in triumph...” It was not by chance that Ravel supposed that within this “happy” scene there should also be room for tragedy: the dance includes an episode of the clandestine love of a girl and a toreador who is stabbed by his rival. The music provided weighty justification for this.
From the very start of the piece, in the music one can hear some mysterious anxiety. Restrained and sorrowful, the impossibly long (thirty-four bars!) melody with its unchanging theme becomes an iron-like and persistently repetitive rhythm... When, after the countless repetition of the theme, the sound reaches apocalyptical power, when the melody suddenly begins to disintegrate into individual intonations, when the unexpected shift in tonality literally tears the theme from its steel carcass of rhythm and thrusts it into a chasm of impending catastrophe one has the uncomfortable feeling that the world is collapsing... It was not by chance that one of the composer’s friends, André Suarès, wrote on the anniversary of Ravel’s death that “The obsession of the rhythm and the melody and the clear desire not to vary the theme... was an insistent, almost hallucinogenic repetition of one and the same musical phrase, a gloomy frenzy of music – all of this, in my opinion, transforms the piece into something akin to Songs and Dances of Death.
Iosif Raiskin

Having settled in Vienna as a “free artist” unconnected to any particular paymaster, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart delightedly wrote to his father “Of course, it is piano country here!” And in truth, at that time, they never played, listened to or printed so much piano music anywhere else. Viennese craftsmen were dedicated body and soul to building and perfecting the instrument. It was with the piano that Mozart’s plans as a performer, composer and teacher were most closely connected. in some four years he had composed fifteen concerti, among them Concerto No 23 in a Major (K. 488).
The concerto was written at the same time as the opera Le nozze di Figaro and it was completed on 2 March 1786. Some words from another of Mozart’s letters are surprisingly appropriate: “It is concerti that are something halfway between too difficult and too easy; they may contain much that dazzles and they may sound extremely pleasant but, of course, they are serious works; there are times when only connoisseurs will receive any pleasure...” It is indeed at one and the same time both a dazzling and a deep work. in the first section there is a virtuoso cadenza written by Mozart himself on the score and absolutely non-virtuoso solos. the final rondo falls into the category of “pleasant to listen to” thanks, first and foremost, to its variety: here there are no less than seven different themes which the soloist exchanges with the orchestra. But the second section is the most famous, an inspired sicilienne, thanks to which for three centuries now this concerto is the most popular of Mozart’s twenty-seven piano concerti.
Anna Bulycheva