Czech Philharmonic • Vasily Petrenko

Piano Concerto in G major (23')

Maurice Ravel

Maurice Ravel did not leave behind a large musical legacy. Some biographers claim this was because of the composer’s other activities—he was also working as a concert pianist, a conductor, and a teacher. Others say it was his meticulousness and the exacting standards he set for himself. He wrote a number of individual compositions and cycles of pieces for his own instrument, the piano, including music for solo piano, for piano four-hands, and for two pianos. He also wrote two piano concertos, both during his late creative period, composing them simultaneously between 1929 and 1931. The Piano Concerto in D major for the left hand was written on commission for the one-handed pianist Paul Wittgenstein (1887–1961), who had also asked other composers of his day to write works for his repertoire.

In his Piano Concerto in G major, Ravel employed a variety of stylistic resources ranging from Spanish folk elements to the jazz influences of his day. He conceived the orchestral accompaniment in an original manner, giving various instruments room to play solo passages. The two outer movements contrast effectively with the melancholy central Adagio. The first movement in sonata form surprisingly repeats material from the development section after the recapitulation and cadenza. The slow movement opens with a long piano solo, with wind instruments taking up the theme one after another. The theme itself has been compared to that of the slow movement of Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet. The winds also play a major role in the orchestration of the rondo finale.

Ravel expected that, as with other works he had written, he would himself be the concerto’s first performer: “It was an interesting experience to work on both concertos at the same time. The one I will be playing myself is a concerto in the true sense of the word. What I mean is that it is written in the spirit of Mozart and Saint-Saëns. In my opinion, the music of a solo concerto has to be light and brilliant, and it should not strive for depth or for dramatic effects”, he wrote. However, problems with Ravel’s health prevented him from playing the piano part. The concerto was premiered on 14 January 1932 with Marguerite Long as the soloist and with Ravel leading the orchestra. The two artists then embarked on a four-month tour, during which they also played the new concerto on 18 February 1932 at a philharmonic concert of the New German Theatre in Prague: “A delicately crafted, polished composition full of spirit, taste, and precision, and a work of art clear as crystal, elegant, and lively”, wrote a Prague critic. “The piano part allows for both mechanistic playing and Lisztian virtuosity, though musicality is required above all in the difficult harmonic passages.” The audience even insisted that the final movement be repeated.

Pictures at an Exhibition, arranged for orchestra by Maurice Ravel (35')

Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky

We are not yet finished with Ravel today. He turned out to be the author of the most successful orchestration of Pictures at an Exhibition, an iconic work by the Russian composer Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky. Whether in the original version for piano or in an orchestral arrangement, it has been one of the composer’s most popular works for more than a century. Mussorgsky was an important figure in the period when the style of Russian classical music was taking shape. A phenomenal melodist, he was unafraid of unconventional procedures, perhaps in part because he was basically self-taught as a composer and an outsider in his personal life. His struggles with alcoholism led to his death at a rather early age.

A great friendship was behind the creation of Pictures from an Exhibition, originally a suite for piano. The painter and architect Viktor Hartmann had close ties to the “Mighty Handful”, a group of composers to which Mussorgsky belonged, alongside Mily Balakirev, Alexander Borodin, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and César Cui. Hartmann liked to employ elements of medieval Russian architecture and folk culture in his works. He died suddenly in 1873 at just 39 years of age. His friends, shaken by the tragic news, organised a retrospective exhibition of Hartmann’s sketches, watercolours, theatrical costume and set designs, and architectural studies, and after having attended the exhibition, Mussorgsky felt the need to capture the experience in music. Early in the summer of 1874, he completed his long, technically difficult suite for piano, admitting it had been written hastily in a letter to Vladimir Stasov, an arts critic and the organiser of the exhibition of Hartmann’s works: “Ideas, melodies come to me of their own accord. They come running to me, ready baked, and I swallow one after the other until I have overeaten. I can hardly put it all down on paper quickly enough.” The composer only wanted to play the suite for his friends, and he had no plans performing it in public or having it published. After Mussorgsky’s death Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov decided to revise the composition and have it printed. It first found a place in the standard repertoire in an orchestral version commissioned from Maurice Ravel by the conductor Serge Koussevitsky in 1922. The result was the perfect combination of Russian Romanticism with the colourful orchestration that was typical of Paris in the early 20th century. Several composers have made attempts at orchestrating Pictures at an Exhibition, but only Ravel’s version has enjoyed wide acceptance.

The suite contains descriptions of ten of Hartmann’s paintings interspersed with repeated appearances of the striking Promenade theme, music that evokes walking through the exhibition. In one of his letters, Mussorgsky mentioned that the promenades were conceived grandly as a reflection of the bulk of his figure. The first picture, Gnomus, is a woodcut of a gnome presented as nutcracker angrily crushing nutshells in its jaws. For this reason, the music “jerks” with irregular rhythms and “cracks” with strong accents. Il vecchio castillo (The Old Castle) sounds like an Italian serenade of long ago, with its English horn melody and cello accompaniment evoking a troubadour’s song in front of a medieval Italian castle. Ravel makes a joke by using the saxophone in this otherwise archaicising movement. Tuileries depicts a park full of children playing and bickering while being watched by their nannies in the famous Parisian garden. The cumbersome music of Bydło (The Oxcart) reflects the hardships of life in the countryside, describing a peasant and an oxcart loaded with timber, the wheels turning with rhythmic regularity. The contrasting quick movement titled Dance of the Baby Chicks in Their Shells is based on a costume design by Hartmann—a dancer dressed in remnants of an eggshell is portrayed in music by a merry scherzo. Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle are two Jews, one a rich authority figure, the other a poor, impudent man. The former is characterised by a powerful melody in the low register, and the other by shrill high notes. Both representations are satirical and reflect Russian antisemitism of the period. The picture of The Market in Limoges suggests swarms of people at a French town market, with shouting vendors, haggling, and arguments. In the subterrestrial Catacombae – Sepulcrum romanum, Hartmann painted himself walking with a lantern and observing bodies buried long ago. Mussorgsky conceived the music as a personal encounter with his deceased friend, and to the movement’s menacing chords and variations, he appended the final Promenade with the Latin subtitle Con mortuis in lingua mortua (With the Dead in a Dead Language). A picture of a bizarre clock in the shape of a hut on chicken legs was interpreted by Mussorgsky as the cabin of the witch Baba Yaga, and he created a demonic scherzo full of twisted harmonies and wild, virtuosic passages. The suite’s climax is the monumental Great Gate of Kiev, inspired by Hartmann’s architectural plan for the Bogatyr Gates in the Ukrainian capital. Into the movement, Mussorgsky inserted one last quote of the Promenade theme, a melody from the Orthodox liturgy, and the ringing of church bells, which assume their true form in Ravel’s orchestration, thereby creating a finale worthy of a work on such a grand scale. Here, with undoubted skill, a Russian artist is paying tribute to Kiev’s historical importance and sovereignty, albeit from a period Russian perspective. One hopes that such respect shall soon make itself felt in our modern times!

Pierre-Laurent Aimard

klavír

The French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who was acquainted with Boulez, Messiaen, and Ligeti, is regarded by most listeners as an interpreter of music of the 20th-century avant-garde, but when he appears at famous venues like New York’s Carnegie Hall or the Konzerthaus in Vienna, he also plays older music, bringing a new perspective to its interpretation. He is also unafraid to take on major projects like performing Beethoven’s complete piano concertos, which he programmed to open the 2020/2021 season as the artist-in-residence of the orchestra Musikkollegium Winterthur.

Foremost among the many honours Pierre-Laurent Aimard has received is the prestigious International Ernst von Siemens Music Prize for 2017. As the son of two neuropsychiatrists, it was actually by chance that he discovered music. While going through the attic of a relative, he found various musical instruments including a piano. “It was love at first sight”, he says. At first he studied at the conservatoire in his hometown Lyon, but at age 12 he was invited to join Yvonne Loriod’s studio at the Paris Conservatoire. He was fascinated by music of the 20th century from his childhood, playing his first piece by Schoenberg at seven years of age! Fortunately, he had the chance to develop that interest once he was older. An important step was collaboration with Pierre Boulez and his newly founded Ensemble intercontemporain, and later he advanced his career by working with such leading composers as György Kurtág, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Marco Stroppa, and Olivier Messaiaen. 

Aimard’s 2018 recording of Messiaen’s Catalogue d'oiseaux earned the pianist many awards including Germany’s prestigious critics’ award Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik. He has also won acclaim for recording the complete piano music of György Ligeti, some of whose compositions will be appearing on the programmes of Aimard’s concerts this season in Europe, North America, Japan, and China in honour of the 100th anniversary of Liget’s birth. Also awaiting him are two premieres: a piano concerto by Clara Iannotta at the festival Acht Brucken and the Portuguese premiere of the composition Se da contra las piedras la libertad by Klaus Ospald. He has also engaged in long-term chamber music collaboration with Tamara Stefanović and the jazz pianist Michael Wollny, and with the French actor Denis Podalydès he is preparing a special theatrical project with music by Ligeti, Kurtág, Schoenberg, and Cage. 

Aimard is coming to Prague with Ravel’s Piano Concerto, which he has played with many ensembles including the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and George Benjamin at the BBC Proms, and his comprehension of Ravel’s music is also documented by a recording with the Cleveland Orchestra and Pierre Boulez (2010).

“I wouldn’t say that I’m a pianist—I’m a musician, and the piano just happens to be my instrument. I don’t like to limit myself to just a single function because that limits my perception of music”, says Aimard. Besides performing a wide range of repertoire as a pianist, he has also served in such positions as artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival. He is a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, and teaching has been an important part of this professional life: he has been an instructor at the Cologne University of Music and Dance and at Paris’s College de France, and he gives lecture concerts and workshops. In the spring of 2020 he relaunched his online project Explore the Score, which focuses on interpreting and teaching Ligeti’s music.