Prélude à l’après midi d’un faune

Program Note:

Born to a life of privilege in the Basque region of southwestern France, Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) demonstrated a prodigious ability at the piano, enough to gain entrance to the Paris Conservatory as a teenager. Despite his pianistic skills, he soon gravitated more toward composition. A marked eclecticism, perhaps inspired by his father’s numerous mechanical inventions, burst forth in great skill with all manner of instrumental styles and folk-inspired idioms. He wrote the Introduction and Allegro for seven chamber players in 1905. Coming fresh on the heels of his lustrous String Quartet, the Introduction and Allegro closes a period of substantial strides in Ravel’s early career.
The work opens onto a hushed, serene world of woodwinds and muted strings. Ravel proceeds to explore both traditional and non-traditional timbres from the full ensemble. Resonances of Debussy’s evocative Prélude à l’après midi d’un faune (1894) lurk just below the surface. Ravel’s gestures are terse and lively, and the main theme in major mode is characteristically bright and scintillating. Abundant arpeggios create a rapturous backdrop against which the work’s main themes periodically step forth. One highlight is the central cadenza for solo harp, coming hard on the heels of the piece’s dynamic climax. Elements of sonata form development and reprise will be heard, and the basic musical material is all laid out in the opening introduction.
The piece may not be one of Ravel’s most ambitious, and the composer clearly had mixed feelings about it. He did not include it in his own catalog, yet he programmed it often and even conducted it for a 1924 recording. Ravel certainly succeeds very well in what he has tried to do: situating the modern chromatic harp in the center of familiar chamber instruments, and writing an impressionist composition full of sensuality and harmonic color. At its premiere in 1907 the piece impressed a Parisian audience and has not left the repertoire ever since.

(c) Jason Stell