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Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) may have some competition from figures like Berlioz, Saint-Saëns, and Claude Debussy, but he is perhaps the most famous of French composers, thanks to his colorful orchestral blockbusters “Boléro,” “La Valse,” and the ballet “Daphnis et Chloé”. However, the heart of his relatively small number of compositions may be his dazzlingly virtuosic piano music.
This year marks the 150th anniversary of Ravel’s birth, and to commemorate it, the award-winning French pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet has been touring the world with a concert program of Ravel’s complete music for solo piano. Bavouzet brings it to the Eastman School of Music’s Kilbourn Hall Nov. 20.
“Ravel’s entire output can be played in about 15 hours – about the length of three Wagner operas,” Bavouzet jokes, “and everything he wrote for piano solo can be played in about two and a half hours.
“Several of my colleagues have also done this; it is a marathon, but it is exciting.” (Many more pianists have recorded Ravel’s complete piano music, and the composer himself made several recordings of individual pieces, demonstrating that he was not the most precise performer of his own music.)
Bavouzet’s Ravel program proceeds chronologically from the early “Sérénade grotesque” (written in 1893, but not performed until 1975) through the bittersweet “Le Tombeau de Couperin” (1917), dedicated to several friends who died in World War I. In between are some of Ravel’s best-known pieces, including the delicate “Pavane for a Dead Princess,” the nightmarish “Gaspard de la Nuit,” and the luscious “Valses nobles et sentimentales.” (Several of these titles also turn up on orchestral concerts, in Ravel’s own arrangements.)
Those two and a half hours of music cover an enormous emotional range and did not come easily to their composer. “Composing was a difficult process for him,” says Bavouzet. “Music did not come pouring out of Ravel’s brain. But almost everything he wrote is absolutely first-rate and is performed often, which is not true of many composers.”
“I do not think Ravel’s music shows much evolution,” he continues. “Unlike such composers of his time as Bartók and Stravinsky, he found his own voice early and did not change his style. To him, achieving perfection was more important than making history.”
Ravel is often considered a quintessentially French composer; Bavouzet agrees with that assessment.
“I would say Ravel’s music possesses a special flair for harmonies and a transparent texture that are typically French. It is also perfect in its proportions, as you see in French castles and gardens. There is a great surface elegance to Ravel, almost a superficiality, that can be taken for granted,” says Bavouzet.
(When a critic accused his music of being “artificial,” Ravel replied, “Does it not occur to people that I might be artificial by nature?”)
“If you dig into the music, you find extreme emotion, profundity, and tension – almost too much to bear,” But Ravel never tears up his shirt to say ‘Look how I am suffering!’ There is almost never ‘I’ in his music,” observes Bavouzet.
Ravel is often paired with another great French composer, Debussy. Both wrote beautiful and original piano music described as “Impressionistic,” but to Bavouzet, “They are so incredibly different! Debussy is cosmic and atmospheric; Ravel is classical in construction, harmony, and melody, everything Debussy is not. Ravel is like Haydn and Stravinsky, who like to challenge the mind of the listener.
“I think Ravel is also very close to Schubert. Both men lived alone but were supported by devoted friends. And both have this melancholy in their music, a sadness and ‘nostalgie’ of childhood.”
Bavouzet is touring the world with his Ravel program, from Santa Monica to Sydney, winding up in Beijing next June. But he has yet to be bored with this composer. “Ravel has been part of my repertoire since I was a student. Everything he wrote is a compositional tour de force,” he says.
Jean-Efflam Bavouzet performs the complete piano music of Maurice Ravel on Nov. 20 at 7:30 p.m. in Kilbourn Hall, Eastman School of Music, 26 Gibbs Street. Information and tickets are available here.
Bavouzet will also present a piano master class in Hatch Recital Hall on Nov. 19 at 7:30 p.m. More information is available here.
David Raymond is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer.
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