Ravel of the Postwar

Maurice Ravel / Bach|Wittgenstein

Piano Concerto in G / Piano Concerto for the left hand / Pieces for left hand

Residentie Orkest The Hague / Anja Bihlmaier

NAIVE CLASSICS, HQ|NORTHSTAR

Catalogue V8447

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About the Album

By yeol eum son

The two piano concertos of Ravel diff er enormously. One starts with a piccolo solo, the instrument with the highest register in the orchestra. The other starts with a contrabassoon solo, the instrument with the lowest register. One requires barely more than one player per woodwind instrument – one each of piccolo, fl ute, oboe, cor anglais – in addition to one trumpet and one trombone. The other requires triple winds. One is luminouswhile the other pulls you into darkness. One was written for both hands, the other for onehand only, although to my mind the reverse would have been much more natural.So are there no similarities, then? Of course there are. In the cadenza of the fi rst move-ment of the Concerto in G major one recognizes traces of the Concerto for the Left Hand, which was completed earlier. Technically speaking, the disposition of notes is almost the same: left thumb plays the melody line, left little finger plays the bass line, and the remaining three fingers play the accompaniment. It feels natural for the left hand to do this; it would almost be strange for the right hand to do the same. In many of Chopin’sNocturnes the left hand performs a similar function: the little finger plays the bass lines and the other left fingers the rest of the accompaniments, so that if you wanted to play them only with the left hand, the extra task would just be adding the melody line. Where as if you were to try and use the right hand, everything would be turned upside down. If thisConcerto had been written for the right hand, would it have been the same?Going back to the first movement’s cadenza in the Concerto in G major. Although the left hand seems self-sufficient, the right hand soon follows with its trill, which I would describe as a “crying bird”: the lark or nightingale, even a crow? Once you make your way out of this chilling section, you come back to the percussive section. The whole piece is quite percussive, pianistically speaking; seventy percent of the piano part in both thefirst and last movements are akin to playing a drum. But the second movement seems to come out of nowhere. How to describe something so unexpected? To my mind, the person who gives this soliloquy is elderly, a silver-haired old woman with layered pearl 6EN necklaces, talking about something that happened long ago. I don’t think her story is sad, but it is sad somehow.Although far darker in mood, the Left-Hand Concerto is not at all sad, to me. Rather, its spirit wants to prove that one hand alone is enough to conquer the world. This is another point of divergence between the two works. There is one more: the structure. This single-movement concerto has three sections, slow-fast-slow, while the Concerto in G major has three movements, fast-slow-fast.Unlike the Concerto in G major, all three sections of the Left-Hand Concerto are extremely difficult, with the middle section being the most difficult. The biggest challenges for me were twofold. First, Ravel’s use of register: the left hand has to cover the whole keyboard, from top to bottom. It is already awkward enough for the left hand to play in the highest octave, but in addition there are endless wide jumps between two notes or chords. Second, the dynamics. Not only are you aiming to play the same dynamic range as you would with both hands but in addition, the size of the orchestra is almost twice as large as it is in the Concerto in G major. It feels like a constant battle between piano and orchestra.I wonder if the two mediums, “piano” and “orchestra”, almost contradicted each other in the mind of Maurice Ravel. Every one of his orchestral works, which demonstrate some of the greatest orchestration of the twentieth century, was either based on a piano piece or followed by a piano version. And some of them even have huge gaps of time between the two versions. How do we make sense of that? For example, one of his earliest works, Menuet antique, written in 1895 was orchestrated 34 years later in 1929. Alborada delgracioso from Miroirs was orchestrated fourteen years after the piano version. The piano and orchestral versions of Une barque sur l’océan, another piece from the suite Miroirs, seem to deal with two very diff erent musical subjects. Was it Ravel’s intention for piano and orchestral versions to be so diff erent from one another?With the orchestra at his disposal, Ravel truly had a kaleidoscopic vision, even though in many cases this started from the piano. So perhaps these two mediums were complementary, to him. And perhaps that explains how these two Concertos, in which piano and orchestra come together, can be considered his pièces de résistance. It may sound7as if I am reading too much into this, but isn’t it also an interesting coincidence that these two concertos are his final completed works – aside from the three “petit” songs of DonQuichotte à Dulcinée.“What should be the last piece of this puzzle?” is the question I was asking myself when I started this recording project in September 2022. For almost two years, I couldn’t decide on how to complete the album. The obvious choice would have been solo pieces by Ravel, but I was reluctant for some reason. Then I realized that it is mainly because the young Ravel and the mature Ravel were like two different people, to me. Ravel before 1914 andRavel after 1918, even, were not the same person. Despite the material they have in common, the Sonatine and Le tombeau de Couperin, the Piano Trio and the Second ViolinSonata, Daphnis et Chloé and Boléro, could have been written by different composers. At least that’s how I feel.Then I reflected on how I felt as I embarked on this project. As a Korean citizen, I found it profoundly moving about recording these concertos in The Hague, with its ResidentieOrkest, in this very city. T o us, The Hague represents an important chapter in our nation’s early independence movements. These concertos are especially meaningful to me because the horrors of the Great War, which shook all of us despite being far apart, seem to be engraved in these pieces. Then, I felt that these pieces by J. S. Bach best repre sented such feelings. While they are not directly related to the two concertos, they were arranged for the left hand by the commissioner of the Concerto for the Left Hand, PaulWittgenstein. His School for the Left Hand is composed of three volumes: 1. Exercises(“Fingerübungen“), 2. Etudes („Etüden“), 3. Transcriptions („Bearbeitungen“). The four pieces by Bach on this album belong to the third volume.I regret that the world has ongoing wars, as I release this album. My only hope, as the pieces at the end of this album show us, is that we can soon see light at the end of such tunnels of darkness.

Album tracks

maurice ravel 1875–1937

piano concerto in G major, M. 83 1929–19311

I. Allegramente 8'552

II. Adagio assai 9'173

III. Presto 4'12

dedicated to Marguerite Long4 piano concerto for the left hand in D major, M. 82 1929–1930 Lento – Allegro – Tempo primo – Allegro 19'58

dedicated to Paul Wittgenstein (1887–1961)

Johann Sebastian Bach 1685–1750

The following pieces are performed in the versions for piano left hand proposed by Paul Wittgenstein in the third part (Volume III · Nos. 1-4) of his School for the Left Hand published in 1957.

Prelude and Fugue in C major, BWV 846 from das Wohltemperierte klavier I 1722

5 Prelude 2'17