Czech Philharmonic • Tokyo

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.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s brother Modest wrote that in the course of 1888, the composer’s “boldest dreams of fame were realised”. He had attained prosperity and universal esteem such as few composers enjoy in their lifetimes. “In his distrustfulness and modesty, he never stops being amazed and delighted that both abroad and in Russia, he receives more recognition than he could have expected. [...] He makes the impression of worldly happiness, and yet he his unhappier than ever before.” Tchaikovsky tried to escape his soul’s inner turmoil by busying himself with conducting engagements that were taking him from city to city and from one country to the next. “The thrill a composer feels when conducting an excellent orchestra playing his music with love and devotion was a new joy for me”, the composer confided. Prague was one of the cities where he received a real ovation: “From the first moment of my arrival, there were countless celebrations, visits, rehearsals, sightseeing etc. They were welcoming me as if I were a representative not of Russian music, but of all of Russia.” Tchaikovsky spent that summer working on his Fifth Symphony. Self-doubt never left him, however. “I want to work diligently to prove to myself and others that I have not yet completely written myself out. Doubts often come to me, and I wonder: is it not time for me to quit? Have I not yet exhausted my imagination?”, he wrote to his patroness Nadezhda von Meck.

There is no doubt that Tchaikovsky’s last three symphonies are works with programmatic subtexts, although there is no specific “plot” to speak of. The Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64, is built on the principle employed by Hector Berlioz in his pioneering Symphonie fantastique. Berlioz lets a single musical idea (idée fixe) run through the entire composition in various transformations, symbolising the composer’s beloved, his future wife Harriet Smithson. At the same time that Tchaikovsky was writing his Fifth Symphony, César Franck employed this same principle in his only symphonic work, the Symphony in D minor, likewise without assigning any concrete meaning to the unifying theme. The clarinet presents the central idea of Tchaikovsky’s penultimate symphony, a gloomy “fate” motif, in the introduction to the first movement. The composer merely hinted at the symphony’s programmatic content. About the first movement, he wrote: “Introduction – complete submission to fate. Allegro – dissatisfaction, doubts, complaints, reproaches”. In the second movement, fate yields to brighter tones, but it is not defeated, and its ominous presence makes itself felt even in the third movement, a light-hearted waltz. The fourth movement again opens with the “fate” motif, this time more distinctively structured, evoking a ceremonial atmosphere. This leads to conciliation expressed by the music of a majestic march, and in its ponderous strides, the burden of fate becomes an inherent part of existence. The struggle is not over, however; it leads to a new surge of energy as the symphony concludes at a fast tempo.

Tchaikovsky conducted the premiere of his Symphony No. 5 on 17 November 1888 in Saint Petersburg. It was a familiar scene for the composer: the audience responded with thunderous applause, while the critics remained divided, some calling the work a routine composition calculated for effect, while others hailed it as one of the most accomplished works of its era.