Concert Preview: Sweet Sound That Breathes Upon a Bank of Violets – Concert I

Tzigane (1922–1924) – Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)

Ravel’s Tzigane represents a thread of European fascination with the music of the Romani people as they are now most commonly called, though whether this strand is a genuine engagement with music of the ethnic group in question is probably controversial, and even the term “Tzigane” itself can be considered pejorative. That said, an attractive lineage of compositions with a distinctive musical idiom does form part of the Western classical tradition.

For the violinist (and erhu player), these famously include Pablo Sarasate’s (1844–1908) Zigeunerweisen (op. 20, 1878). The style reaches as far back as Haydn, and the third and last movement of his piano trio no. 39 in G major, Hob XV:25, of 1795, is titled “Rondo a l’Ongarese: Rondo” and marked “Rondo, in the Gypsies stile” on the piano part of the first edition (undated, but probably 1795, the year in which the work was composed in London). Similarly, the third movement of his string quartet op. 20, no 4, Hob III:34, of 1772, is marked “Minuetto all Zingarese” on early editions, including the first English edition, published only a few years later. Aside from works specifically entitled as of “gypsy” or “Hungarian” origin (for example, Gypsy Songs, op. 103), Brahms also incorporated the style into his compositions of “absolute” music, and his first piano quartet, op. 25, has its fourth and last movement marked “Rondo all Zingarese”.

Ravel’s particular attraction to the “gypsy” style that initiated the composition of his Tzigane probably stems from the violinist to whom it was dedicated, Jelly d’Arányi (1893–1966), who gave the first performance in London in 1924. Situated at the heart of the Central European violin tradition and its symbiotic relationship with “gypsy” fiddle playing, she studied with Jenö Hubay (1858–1937) in Budapest and was the dedicatee of Bartók’s two sonatas for violin and piano.

She must have been some violinist! In Tzigane, it is all there: slow, sultry and passionate melody; recitative, complex chordal patterns; left-hand pizzicato; passages high up on the G string and in octaves; glissandos, repeated down-bows; “exotic” modes; tremolos; and gradually accelerating semiquaver passagework. Compared with other virtuoso “show-pieces”, it is in fact more challenging, partly because there is evidently an underlying musical content that needs to be interpreted, particularly regarding the arrangement of modal patterns, and partly because the different technical “fireworks” are often arranged in close succession, so the violinist is not able to build up a sense of continuity. One moment left-hand pizzicato is required, then suddenly vibrant chords, then suddenly tremolo.

Early editions of the score mark the piano or the “luthéal” as alternative possible accompanying instruments, and Ravel also made his own orchestration of the part. A luthéal is a piano equipped with stops so it can play different timbres, and one of these is a cimbalom stop that imitates the Hungarian dulcimer from which it takes his name, and it was used in the first performance. The instrument was patented in 1919 by the organ builder Georges Cleotens and had a brief flowering in Ravel’s Tzigane and L’Enfant et les Sortiléges. Only a handful were built, and the accompanying part is usually played on the piano, though in recent years violinists such as Daniel Hope have recorded the Tzigane in its original combination. A more interesting experiment might be to recompose the entire accompaniment for cimbalom. British cimbalom player and student of mine Elsa Bradley has done just that for Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen and other works, though Tzigane still awaits her attention.

Cello Sonata, op. 65 (1846) – Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849)

I Allegro moderato

II Scherzo

III Largo

IV Finale: Allegro

The dedicatee of the cello sonata was cellist August Franchomme (1808–1884), who performed the work with Chopin at the Salle Pleyel in Paris in 1848, the last concert that Chopin gave. As a pianist, Chopin wrote few works that were not for the piano, though this is one, and none that did not include the piano. Its composition appears to be simply an act of friendship on the part of Chopin, and its dedication to a fellow professional distinguishes it from the more commercial act of dedication to a wealthy patron.

Like the first movement of the piano sonatas in B minor and B♭ minor, although the first movement of the cello sonata (in G minor) is couched in a traditional sonata form with the requisite tripartite structure of exposition, development and recapitulation, its development section is in fact fused into the recapitulation so that only when the second subject of the exposition is heard in the recapitulation is the overall architecture revealed. This second subject is supremely simple and poetic – just a few chords in the piano, echoed by the cello – and luminescent in B♭ major, the “relative” major (the equivalent key with the same number of sharps and flats), in the exposition, but darker and more sombre in the home key G minor in the recapitulation.

The scherzo movement comes next and contrasts a light-hued scherzo with a soft and cantabile trio, and a truncated reprise of the scherzo rounds off the overall ternary form. Franchomme was renowned as the epitome of the delicate and finely shaped French style of cello playing, and perhaps the elegance of his musical persona has seeped into the musical language here.

The beating heart of the whole composition is the slow movement, a largo, which could be regarded as a piano prelude written for cello and piano. Like most of Chopin’s preludes, it has no internal structure based on a preconceived framework of contrast, variation and reprise, but instead is a constant reworking and remoulding of the same musical elements into a single cantabile line that spans the entire work.

A similar lack of tangible musical form is evident in the last movement. A framework of sonata form can be discerned but a better analysis might be to regard the whole as a concert piece composed of a series of episodes, much as are many of Chopin’s larger piano works. Amid the energetic textures, lighter moments of the “Franchomme” style do emerge. Several cello passages in chords are noticeable, all difficult to execute and not necessarily idiomatically suited to the instrument. Imagine Chopin’s thrill to hear the sustained effect of two voices on one instrument, for however handled, on his beloved piano, once a hammer has struck the string, the sound decays. He was clearly intoxicated.

Violin Sonata no. 2 (1923–1927) – Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)

I Allegretto

II Blues: Moderato

III Perpetuum mobile

Ravel dedicated this sonata to Hélène Jourdan-Morhange (1888–1961), with whom he played violin and piano duos and who also played the violin part in the first performance of his sonata for violin and cello (1922). The first violin sonata is a youthful work that was published posthumously, so the second sonata is his only mature work in the genre.

After the travails of the First World War, Ravel’s style has slimmed down, become more sinuous and linear and is less “impressionist”. In the first movement, melodies remain principally “white-note” and curvaceous, but the juxtapositions that are placed against them jangle more and are sometimes even bitonal. Modal piquancy abounds, for example the C♯ added into the G major “white-note” scale of the opening, which sharpens the fourth degree and thus implies the Lydian mode (the mode of the white-note scale on F, here transposed). In the fourth bar, it is a G♯ that is added to similar effect.

Micro-motifs are inserted into the narrative and splatter the canvas like an abstract painting, for instance, an upward scale in root position triads in the piano or reiterated staccatos in the violin. There are even instances of “wrong-note” technique, by which the musical dialogue gives the impression that wrong notes are being played, a notable case being a melody in consecutive diminished octaves in the piano. Chopin and indeed a younger Ravel would have written “perfect” (not diminished) octaves, but a shell-shocked Europe revelled in dissonance. In other sections, the texture is clean and bare – a melody high up in the violin with bell-like bare fifths in the treble range as the accompaniment in the piano. The overall sonata layout is still there – exposition, development, recapitulation – with two subjects in the modulatory exposition reprised in the recapitulation, but it is imbued with so much incandescent and mesmeric melody that it seems churlish to dwell too long on the substrata of musical organisation.

The second and third movements are “character” pieces rather than formal organisations of sound. In the second, “Blues”, to the twang of pizzicato chords, dotted fragments of melody, like pulsating stars, adorn the texture. The violin hops around, replete with drunken glissandos, and perhaps not always as classically and perfectly as his or her training requires. At times garish and rampant, this is music of the urban boardwalk, a pulsating metropolis that does not sleep.

The third “Perpetuum mobile” is sweet revenge, as the continuous semiquaver movement is given to the violin and the piano provides the accompaniment. In the 19th-century violin sonata, the violin is inevitably awarded the lion’s share of the melody, whereas the piano is rewarded with fistfuls of notes of unremitting density and extreme technical complexity. In Ravel’s finale, the pianist can allow the violin the privilege of executing the passagework while playing an accompaniment that is blessed with fewer notes.

Introduction and Polonaise Brillante, op. 3 (1829)

– Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849)

An early work, the Introduction and Polonaise Brillante was composed when Chopin visited the estate of Antoni Radziwiłł (1775–1833) and dedicated to the celebrated Austrian cellist Joseph Merk (1795–1852). Prince Antoni was an extraordinarily rich Polish and Prussian nobleman noted for his patronage of the arts. Like Chopin, the depth of his Polish allegiance fluctuated, and at times he seemed more on the side of the Prussian oppressors than the Polish patriots, just as Chopin’s music can appear more the work of a French artist than that of a Polish nationalist. The 19-year-old Chopin was not yet the international celebrity he later became and was undoubtedly an attractive young man, perhaps not yet so burdened with the consumptive illness that overwhelmed him. Antoni’s cellist daughter, Wanda, would undoubtedly have been charmed and possibly only too pleased to practise the new cello piece Chopin had composed. Perhaps his choice to compose a polonaise marked “alla polacca” was an expression of his finely nuanced relationship with his homeland.

From a musical perspective, Chopin, as always, concentrates on cantabile melody, usually in the cello, and although it is ornamented, these decorations are sparing and telling. One of Chopin’s common criticisms was that other interpreters of his music mimicked his ornamentation but applied it in places where it was not intended, to the detriment of the overall effect. Many different performing versions of his Introduction and Polonaise Brillante exist and add extra embellishment, which may be effective in performance, but they uproot the composition from its erstwhile home in Prince Antoni’s drawing room, played by his daughter and Chopin himself, and then by the serious-minded Joseph Merk.

The Introduction is framed around a meaty augmented sixth chord at the climax towards the close, which lasts for one long, slow bar and where the cello holds a fruity bass note that resolves, as augmented sixth chords do, chromatically down by semitone to the chord on the fifth degree of the scale. This in turn is held for several bars, the last of which is a cadenza that glides in a “perfect” cadence into the Polonaise itself. All the leaping energy of the Polish patriot is now evident, with the musical structure governed by the opening theme that recurs in a rondo format during the composition, perhaps a none-too-subtle hint to Prince Antoni, via his daughter, to support his compatriots in their struggle.

Programme notes by Ernest Robin