Remembering Seiji Ozawa

Seiji Ozawa, the internationally renowned Japanese conductor, passed away in Tokyo last week (February 6, 2024) as a result of heart failure. He was 88. Ozawa’s 29-year tenure as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra began in 1973. Prior to the appointment, he served as music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (1965-1969) and the San Francisco Symphony (1970-1977). In 1984, he founded the Saito Kinen Orchestra in Matsumoto, Japan. In …

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Ravel’s “L’Heure Espagnole”: An Enchanting One-Act Comédie Musicale

Maurice Ravel’s 1911 comic opera in one act, L’heure espagnole, is a hilariously enchanting farce. Its literal title, “The Spanish Hour,” can be more accurately translated as “Spanish Time,” or “How They Keep Time in Spain.” The libretto by Franc-Nohain is based on a 1904 play by the same author. Set in eighteenth century Spain, the plot of L’heure espagnole centers around Concepción, the restless and lusty wife of a preoccupied clockmaker …

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Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major: Lighthearted, Brilliant, and Bluesy

With the slap of a whip, Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major springs to life. Suddenly, a magically intricate machine is propelled into motion. With the solo piano in its twinkling highest register, a toy soldier march in the piccolo, delicate string pizzicati and harmonics, and the almost imperceptible whir of the snare drum, we are whisked into an enchanting world of innocence and imagination. In these glistening opening bars, we …

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Ravel’s “Le Tombeau de Couperin”: Paavo Järvi and the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra

Maurice Ravel completed the solo piano suite, Le Tombeau de Couperin, in 1917 amid the devastation of the First World War. The 17th century word, tombeau, refers to “a piece written as a memorial.” Ravel dedicated each of the suite’s movements to the memory of a friend who was lost in the war. Yet, there is nothing somber or elegiac about this music. The bleak, mechanized dehumanization of the twentieth century battlefield is left …

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Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Poulenc: Three Twentieth Century Pastorales

With roots in the Baroque period, the musical pastorale evokes a serene, bucolic landscape. Often, it rolls along in a gentle 6/8 time and suggests the simple, free-floating melodies and drones of a shepherd’s bagpipes. J.S. Bach’s Pastorella In F Major, BWV 590 for organ, the final movement of Corelli’s “Christmas” Concerto, and the Pastoral Symphony from Handel’s Messiah are famous examples. The sound world of the twentieth century was dominated by …

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Ravel’s “Trois poèmes de Mallarmé”: Reveries Transcribed

In a 1927 interview with the New York Times, Maurice Ravel discussed the influence of the French Symbolist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898): Mallarmé exorcised our language, like the magician that he was. He has released the winged thoughts, the unconscious daydreams from their prison. Ravel’s 1913 song cycle, Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, enters this dreamy world in which allusion, metaphor, and ambiguity reign. The composer said that his aim was to “transcribe …

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Ravel’s “Miroirs”: Reflections on the Nature of Reality

…the eye sees not itself, but by reflection, by some other things. -William Shakespeare  Maurice Ravel was fascinated by this line from the first act of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Perhaps these words, laced with mysticism and challenging the nature of reality, are not so far off from the French symbolist aesthetic of the late nineteenth century. The line between reality and reflection blurs in Ravel’s five-movement suite for solo piano, Miroirs (“Reflections”), written …

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