MASTERWORKS CONCERT III: Ravel’s Piano Concerto with Pianist Jon Nakamatsu

There are very few composers who have the true gift of orchestrating a piece of music like a painting – complete with invention, craft, precision, and perfection of color. Maurice Ravel, one of the most quintessentially French composers, possessed the rare ability to express the ultimate goal of any artistic language: to capture the inexplicable or inexpressible through the delicate balance of craft and inspiration. 

Like many other French artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Ravel was fascinated by Spanish culture, for Ravel’s mother was Basque and spent most of her youth in Madrid. The influence from the exotic lifestyles of Spain balanced well with Ravel’s love of precision, sense of symmetry, order, and perfection that came from his father’s engineering background. 

As a student of Gabriel Fauré, the true predecessor of the musical impressionist era of Debussy, Ravel learned the intricate and rich colors of harmony and orchestration at the Paris Conservatory. Yet despite his seemingly perfect orchestral works, Ravel did not want to be recognized for his dazzling precision of technique; for Ravel, that meant dry, detached, and artificial, rather than warmly human and inspired image. 

What Ravel wanted his peers and audience to remember was that his technique was merely a means to an end, and his music reveals all the tenderness and human emotion that lies inside the very private composer. Ravel proclaimed that “music made only with technique and intellect loses its special quality as the expression of human feeling. Music should always be first emotional and only after that intellectual.”

Ravel, who never married, remained a reserved and emotionally quiet man. Accordingly, any account of his life, to a large extent, is a list of external events. He suffered a tragic end for he was stricken with severe insomnia and anxiety, and rapidly lost the ability of certain physical movements (known today as Pick’s disease), which prevented him from composing the last few years of his life. 

Ravel, in addition to orchestrating several other composers’ works (such as Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition), is best known for his two operas, the ballet Daphnis et Chloé, chamber works, several solo piano works and songs, and orchestral works including La Valse, Rapsodie Espagnole, Schéhérazade, the very popular Boléro, and two piano concertos.

Ravel’s two piano concertos (the Piano Concerto in G major and the Piano Concerto for Left Hand) were his last major compositions, and he worked on them simultaneously over several years. In 1929, while still healthy, Ravel completed a successful American tour and decided to write a work to display his own piano virtuosity. 

“It was written very much in the spirit as those of Mozart and Saint-Saëns,” explained Ravel. “The music of a concerto should, in my opinion, be light- hearted and brilliant, and not aim at profundity or dramatic effects.” As such, Ravel composed the Piano Concerto using merely a handful of winds, two horns, one trumpet, one trombone, and only 32 strings – an ensemble similar in size to a Mozart work. From the playful piccolo solo that opens the work to the roller coaster ride finale, Ravel incorporates many styles that interested him throughout his career. The first movement incorporates the Basque flavor themes drawn from his mother’s ancestry, Spanish style rhythms, and even “blue” notes recalling jazz and sounds of American music, specifically the works of Gershwin. 

An extended solo opens the second movement displaying one of the most understated, expressive piano solos. The entire movement barely gets above a soft dynamic until the third movement breaks the mood bringing a thrilling, energetic conclusion. 

Tragically, Ravel never played the premiere performance. While preparing for the work, he became more and more exhausted and fatigued – the early signs that his dementia disease was progressing. Ironically, the composer who kept most of his inner emotions trapped inside himself became trapped artistically from expressing any of his musical ideas. Upon listening to his own music the year he died, Ravel said in tears: “I’ve still so much music in my head.”