Maurice Ravel - Ballet and Dance Music (Yannick Nézet-Séguin)

Information

Composer: Maurice Ravel

• (01-03) Daphnis et Chloé - Suite No. 2
• (04-11) Valses nobles et sentimentales
• (12) La Valse
• (13-17) Ma mère l'Oye - Suite

Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra
Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor

Date: 2009
Label: EMI

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Review

For the Ravel lover (and who isn’t?), here is a compilation of four of his top hits. If only Boléro had been included, for which there would have been room on the disc, one would almost have no need for another collection of the composer’s orchestral works, considering that he didn’t write that many. In fact, most of Ravel’s pieces familiar to us in their orchestral garb were originally written for piano and only later orchestrated. That includes two of the works on this program, the Valses nobles et sentimentales and Ma Mère l’Oye (“Mother Goose”). In the case of La Valse , the reverse occurred when Ravel arranged the piece for two pianos after he’d composed the orchestral version.

If the ugly, hideous, and grotesque are legitimate subjects for the artist to portray, then three of Ravel’s works must rank high among some of the most artfully drawn musical caricatures of the grotesque in existence. One of them, Gaspard de la nuit , a masterly study in deviant behavior, depicts in one of its movements the carcass of a hanged man reddened by the setting sun. But otherwise, as far as I know, it was not an attempt by Ravel to parody an earlier Romantic style. Rather, it was a calculated effort to one-up Balakirev’s Islamey for the title of most difficult piano piece ever written. But Ravel’s Tzigane and La Valse , the latter heard here, were clearly meant to be aberrant distortions of Romantic models. Tzigane ’s most immediate target was of course Paganini’s diableries and Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen , but it also lampooned by guilt of association other examples of exoticism in music, such as Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole , Chabrier’s España , and even Mozart’s Janissary episodes in his A-Major Violin Concerto, his Rondo alla Turca , and of course his opera Così fan tutte. But this too was mostly tongue-in-cheek, harmless fun.

Not so amusing or harmless is Ravel’s La Valse , which is a deliberately twisted deformation of the pathological waltz craze of late-19th-century Viennese culture as it descended into a surreal madness. Of La Valse , composer George Benjamin said, “Whether or not it was intended as a metaphor for the predicament of European civilization in the aftermath of the Great War, its one-movement design plots the birth, decay, and destruction of a musical genre.” To that I would only add, of course it was intended. Celebrated conductor Erich Kleiber also appreciated La Valse’s toxic and corrosive fumes when he described it as a “waltz poisoned with absinthe.”

I’ve always felt a bit uncomfortable pigeonholing Ravel and Debussy together as if they both fit into the same French Impressionist mold. True, Ravel could compose an Impressionist work like Daphnis et Chloé , with its lush harmonies, pastel washes of color, atmospheric effects, and barely concealed eroticism. But in much else by Ravel, I hear a composer who paints in bold, primary colors, and whose music is more objective, more “deeply technical in compositional procedures,” according to note author Richard Langham Smith, and more distilled down to bare essentials. In this, I think Ravel shares some of the same neoclassical tendencies of Stravinsky. Ravel’s Impressionism, if that’s what one chooses to call it, was that of a composer with a neoclassical bent, whereas Debussy’s Impressionism was that of a late or post-Romanticism that actually has more in common with Wagner and the Viennese post-Romantics like Franz Schmidt, Alexander Zemlinsky, and even Mahler and early Schoenberg than we sometimes care to admit.

One hears Ravel’s neoclassicism in two works on this disc, the Valses nobles et sentimentales , inspired according to the composer by Schubert, and Ma Mère l’Oye , a ballet score in which Ravel’s fascination with the world of childhood is refined and refracted through the lens of the style ancien , rather in the manner of an 18th-century suite.

This is one terrific disc. Yannick Nézet-Ségun, who took the reins of the Rotterdam Philharmonic in 2008, demonstrates a real flair for Ravel. I had glowing things to say about Laurent Petitgirard’s Daphnis et Chloé on Naxos back in Fanfare 30:5, and of course this new recording won’t replace it because Petitgirard gives us the ballet complete, whereas here we get the popular Suite No. 2. Still, performance-wise Nézet-Ségun and his Netherlanders are fantastic, and sonically EMI’s recording goes even wider and deeper than the Naxos does. But I think it’s in La Valse that Nézet-Ségun outclasses even my longtime favorite, Charles Dutoit and the Montreal Symphony, when it comes to venting the venomous vapors that well up from the septic sump. Extraordinary too is how seamlessly Nézet-Ségun is able to shift gears to the not-quite-so-innocent yet somehow wistful reminiscences of childhood in the Mother Goose Suite, and how easily the Rotterdam players adjust the coloration of their ensemble sound to follow his chameleon-like act. This is one release I would strongly urge you not to pass up.

-- Jerry Dubins, FANFARE

More reviews:
https://www.gramophone.co.uk/review/ravel-la-valse-mother-goose-daphis-et-chlo%C3%A9-suite-no-2
http://www.classical-music.com/review/yannick-n%C3%A9zet-s%C3%A9guin-conducts-ravel
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2010/Feb10/Ravel_nezet-seguin_9663422.htm
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/jan/31/ravel-daphnis-chloe-rotterdam-seguin
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/classicalcdreviews/6980592/Ravel-Daphnis-et-Chloe-Suite-No-2-Valses-nobles-et-sentimentales-La-Valse-Ma-Mere-loye.html
https://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/reviews/ravel-daphnis-et-chloe-suite-no-2-valses-nobles-et-sentimentales-la-valse-ma-mere-loye-suite-rotterdam-ponezet-seguin/
https://www.allmusic.com/album/ravel-daphnis-et-chlo%C3%A9-suite-no-2-valses-nobles-et-sentimentales-la-valse-ma-m%C3%A8re-loye-mw0001432204
https://www.amazon.com/Ravel-Daphnis-Valses-nobles-sentimentales/dp/B002OLTASG

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Maurice Ravel (7 March 1875 – 28 December 1937) was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with impressionism along with Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was internationally regarded as France's greatest living composer. Among his works to enter the repertoire are pieces for piano, chamber music, two piano concertos, ballet music, two operas, and eight song cycles. His best known works include Boléro (1928), Gaspard de la nuit (1908), Daphnis et Chloé (1912). Ravel was also an exceptionally skilled orchestrator.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Ravel

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Yannick Nézet-Séguin, CC (born 6 March 1975) is a Canadian conductor and pianist. Nézet-Séguin studied piano with Anisia Campos at the Conservatoire de musique du Québec, and also did many master classes with renowned conductors. He considers Charles Dutoit as his first inspiration as a child and Carlo Maria Giulini as his master. He currently holds leadership posts with the Orchestre Métropolitain (Montréal), the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. In June 2016 he was named music director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York beginning in 2020.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yannick_N%C3%A9zet-S%C3%A9guin
https://yannicknezetseguin.com

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