Twentieth Century

Ravel’s “Le Tombeau de Couperin” in Two Shades

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We explored Maurice Ravel’s magical 1917 suite, Le Tombeau de Couperin, in a previous post. Composed in the aftermath of the First World War, it is music that retreats into the graceful motion and elegance of Baroque dances such as the Forlane, Menuet, and Rigaudon. It pays homage to the keyboard suites of the French Baroque composer, François Couperin (1668-1733), while serving, simultaneously, as a memorial for friends Ravel lost in the war. When listeners commented …

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Takemitsu’s “A String Around Autumn”: Entering an Imaginary Landscape

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Alex Ross once used the phrase “intense repose” to describe the music of the twentieth century Japanese composer, Tōru Takemitsu (1930-1996). At the heart of Takemitsu’s music is the traditional Japanese concept of Ma, literally “negative space,” or “powerful silence” as the composer defined it. As with water droplets at the crest of an ocean wave, this music often seems to emerge out of silence and then dissolve back into it. What we hear in between seems …

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Ravel’s Sonatine: Crystalline Classicism Made-to-Order

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Musical Competition: Compose the first movement of a Pianoforte Sonate in F sharp minor, not to exceed 75 bars in length. A prize of 100 francs will be given for the winning composition. This advertisement, placed in the Weekly Critical Review in March of 1903, was the impetus for Maurice Ravel’s Sonatine for solo piano. Ravel entered the competition at the urging of his close friend, Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi, a contributor to the short-lived, Anglo-French cultural publication. In …

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Bartók’s “Out of Doors”: Ancient Rustic Sounds

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The vibrant hum of nature blends with distant, ghostly echoes from ancient Hungarian villages in Béla Bartók’s Out of Doors (Szabadban). Written in 1926, the work is a collection of five brief and atmospheric pieces for solo piano. Taken together, the movements unfold in a symmetrical arch form, a structure Bartók used in multiple pieces, including the Fourth and Fifth String Quartets, Concerto for Orchestra, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, and the Second Piano Concerto. Bartók …

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Bartók’s Second Violin Concerto: A Musical Farewell to Hungary

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Béla Bartók completed his Second Violin Concerto in 1938 as the storm clouds of fascism gathered in his native Hungary. That year, he wrote to a friend in Switzerland, What is most appalling is the imminent danger that Hungary too will surrender to this system of robbers and murderers… Hungary, where unfortunately the ‘educated’ Christian people are almost exclusively devoted to the Nazi system. I am really ashamed that I come from …

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“Le Secret”: Fauré’s Mystical Art Song

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Throughout Gabriel Fauré’s 1879 song, Le Secret, serene, hypnotically repeating chords in the piano toll like an immortal bell. We drift into a detached dreamscape which seems to anticipate the final, time-altering movement of Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time.  The song’s text is a setting of Paul-Armand Silvestre’s poem, Mystère, from the collection, Le pays des roses (1882). Its three stanzas blur the lines between dawn, day, and night. A sense of transcendental mystery is …

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“Appalachian Fantasy”: Tessa Lark Returns to Bluegrass Roots

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In her debut solo album, Fantasy, violinist Tessa Lark returns to her Kentucky roots. The album, released last September, is an exploration of the musical fantasy, a type of piece which develops with a sense of spontaneous, improvisatory freedom. Alongside music of Telemann, Schubert, Ravel, and Kreisler stands Lark’s own Bluegrass-infused Appalachian Fantasy. It’s music which blends melodic strands of Schubert with echoes of American folk songs such as Cumberland Gap and Bonaparte’s Retreat. The result is spirited music …

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