Ravel Plays Ravel: The Haunting, Melancholy ‘Oiseaux Tristes,’ 1922

Brief but beautiful . . . from Open Culture. Maurice Ravel is one of my favorite composers for the piano, and his Piano Concerto in G Major (included at no extra charge below this post) is probably my favorite composition of all time - not for its technical brilliance, although there is that, but for its unabashed joy.

Ravel Plays Ravel: The Haunting, Melancholy ‘Oiseaux Tristes,’ 1922

January 17th, 2013

Yesterday we featured a piano-roll recording of the French composer Claude Debussy playing his “La soirée dans Grenade” in 1913. Today we bring you a lyrical and melancholy work recorded in 1922 on a similar device by Debussy’s younger friend and rival, Maurice Ravel. It’s called ”Oiseaux tristes,” or “Sad birds.”

The impetus for composing the piece came in 1904, when Ravel heard a second-hand account of something Debussy had said. According to Alexis Roland-Manuel, Ravel’s friend and biographer, Debussy had told the pianist Ricardo Viñes that when writing his experimental piece, “D’un cahier d’esquisses,” he had been “dreaming of a kind of music whose form was so free that it would sound improvised, of works which would seem to have been torn out of a sketchbook.” Viñes recounted Debussy’s statement at a meeting of “Les Apaches,” a group of radical writers, artists and musicians, of which Ravel was a member. Ravel responded by saying that he was ready to put Debussy’s dream into action. He drew his inspiration from an experience he had one morning in the forest at Fontainbleau. Ravel’s friend and former music school classmate Émile Vuillermoz remembered:

He was staying with friends and one morning he heard a blackbird whistling a tune and was enchanted by its elegant, melancholy arabesque. He had merely to transcribe this tune accurately, without changing a note, to produce the limpid, poetic piece which spiritualises the nostalgic call of this French brother of the Forest Bird in Siegfried.

After the meeting, Ravel set to work on the E-Flat Minor “Oiseaux tristes,” which he dedicated to Viñes and included in his five-piece suite, Miroirs. “Oiseaux tristes is the most typical of my way of thinking,” Ravel wrote in his 1928 autobiographical sketch. “It evokes birds lost in the oppressiveness of a very dark forest during the hottest hours of summer.”

Ravel recorded “Oiseaux tristes” and four other pieces in London on June 30, 1922, using a Duo-Art reproducing piano. Unlike the Welte-Mignon machine used by Debussy in 1913 (Ravel also made a pair of recordings on the Welte-Mignon at about the same time as Debussy) the Duo-Art system did not automatically record the dynamics of the performance. So when Ravel played “Oiseaux tristes” at the studio in London, there was an engineer seated next to him at a console, turning dials to capture the dynamic modulations in his playing. Afterward, Ravel listened to a playback on a pianola and, satisfied with the results, signed his name on the original roll.

Maurice Ravel: Piano Concreto in G Major, Hélène Grimaud, pianist.

Musicians@Google: Joshua Bell & Jeremy Denk

Awesome - Joshua Bell is a fabulous musician. I first became aware of his talent through an experiment he participated in for the Washington Post.

Will one of the nation's greatest violinists be noticed in a D.C. Metro stop during rush hour? Joshua Bell experimented for Gene Weingarten's story in The Washington Post (Video by John W. Poole)

Here is the Google video.




Musicians@Google: Joshua Bell & Jeremy Denk

Musicians Joshua Bell and Jeremy Denk visit Google's New York, NY office to performed a few selections from their new album "French Impressions." After the performance, Bell and Denk chat with Google's Eileen Naughton about their collaboration.

On their new album "French Impressions," Grammy-award-winning violinist Joshua Bell and his longtime friend and recital partner, pianist Jeremy Denk offer a passionately nuanced interpretation of works by Saint-Saëns, Ravel and Franck. "French Impressions" boasts a number of milestones: it's Bell's first CD of sonatas since joining Sony Classical in 1996; it is Bell and Denk's first recital album together, and it's the first commercial recording made at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix.

Joshua Bell has enchanted audiences worldwide with his breathtaking virtuosity and tone of rare beauty. His restless curiosity and multifaceted musical interests have taken him in exciting new directions which have earned him the rare title of "classical music superstar." Often referred to as the poet of the violin, Bell is the recipient of the Avery Fisher Prize and is the newly named Music Director of The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. Bell first came to national attention at the age of 14 in a highly acclaimed orchestral debut with Riccardo Muti and the Philadelphia Orchestra. His Carnegie Hall debut and a recording contract further confirmed his presence in the music world. Today he is equally at home as a soloist, chamber musician, orchestra leader and composer who performs his own cadenzas to several of the major concerto repertoire.

American pianist Jeremy Denk has steadily built a reputation as one of today's most compelling and persuasive artists with an unusually broad repertoire. He has appeared as soloist with many major orchestras, including the Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, New World, St. Louis, and San Francisco Symphonies, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Orchestra of St. Luke's, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and London Philharmonia.