PARISIAN IMPRESSIONS

Slovak State Philharmonic Košice
Tomáš BRAUNER, conductor
Nicholas McCARTHY, piano

Programme:

Maurice Ravel: My Mother Goose (Ma mère l'Oye), suite (15´)
Maurice Ravel: Piano Concerto in D major for Left Hand, M. 82 (19´)

-- intermission --

Claude Debussy: More (La Mer), three symphonic sketches, L. 109 (24´)

The suite My Mother Goose is characterized by composer Maurice Ravel as five children's pieces. He originally wrote it for four-hand piano. He later instrumentalised the work and it is presented in the form of an orchestral suite. Ravel's intention to resurrect the poetry of childhood forced him to simplify the style and make the texture more lucid. It is this refined simplicity, full of subtle emotion and poetry, that further enhances the charm of these charming, unusually witty instrumental miniature musical poems.

At the time he was writing his Piano Concerto in G major, Ravel was offered the chance to write a concerto for the left hand by Paul Wittgenstein, an accomplished pianist who had lost his right hand in the First World War. Ravel was delighted by this offer and soon the Piano Concerto in D major for the left hand was written. The concerto has features of dignified solemnity and with a touch of a certain noble pathos. The composer himself described it by saying that the work 'contains many jazz effects and a rather complicated texture.' Ravel's Spanish temperament, combined with his penchant for impressionistic stylisation, clearly inspired this concerto. The sarabande rhythm constantly returns in it, evoking the elegant atmosphere of a period knight's courtliness. For all its poeticism, the concerto is extremely virtuosic in interpretation and requires extraordinary technical and expressive skills.

In More, Claude Debussy combined three symphonic sketches into one monumental whole. The thematic structure here is much clearer than in Debussy's other works, but the main formative element is rhythm. Even in the finale, which is a musical stylization of a dramatic natural phenomenon, rhythm dominates over all other means of musical characterization. Debussy, who loved not only the sea but nature in general, resisted descriptive depictions of nature in music. He was not concerned with imitation, but with the emotional or whimsical expression of its beauty. His music captured even the most subtle sounds and feelings it evokes: the lapping of the waves, the overwhelming atmosphere of the South Seas, the reflections of light on the water or the sounds of joyful sailing.