Maurice Ravel
Tzigane
By the early 1920s Maurice Ravel was a well-established composer, associated with musical impressionism and more particularly with his compatriot and sometime rival, Claude Debussy. But Ravel’s compositional style was much broader than just impressionism, encompassing influences from jazz and blues to Bach and Mozart, from French baroque to Spanish folk tunes. Hungarian music was added to the mix when the composer met the Hungarian violinist Jelly d’Aryáni, a grand-niece of the great 19th-century violinist Joseph Joachim. After hearing her perform at a private concert in London, Ravel is said to have been so impressed that he encouraged her to play gypsy tunes until early the next morning.
Though at work on his opera L’Enfant et les sortileges, Ravel was inspired to write a piece for the talented violinist. He completed the work in 1924 and d’Aryáni premiered it with pianist Henri Gil-Marchex in April of that year. The title, Tzigane, means “gypsy.”
It is a rhapsody–a one-movement work encompassing several contrasted moods–and was originally written for just violin and piano or luthéal, a piano-like instrument that had several tone registers controlled with stops. Later that summer Ravel created a version for violin with orchestra, heard in today’s concert.
Tzigane opens with an extended solo for the violin, equal parts
pathos and bravado. It is not until we are nearly halfway into the length of the
work that the harp and lower strings enter, soon joined by the rest of the
strings and a trilling piccolo. The music then segues between dances of every
musical hue, from sinuous to agitated, broad to delicate, always colored by
Ravel’s brilliant skills as an orchestrator. At one point the soloist launches
into a fantastic high-pitched duet with the piccolo, only to have the entire
orchestra join in a sort of musical free-fall, as if the energy of that moment
had exhausted them all. Not to worry, the violin calls everyone back to the
dance, and the piece ends with the expected fireworks for both orchestra and
soloist.