Marice Ravel is one of my favorite composers. I'm not so crazy about his works as to love every one of them. (Bach is a favorite, too, but I don't love every piece by him, either; the same with Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Debussy, Wagner, and so on. But with Ravel, I've liked everything from him I've heard so far.)
One of the earliest pieces of Ŕavel's that I learned to like was Pour le tombeau de Couperin, a collection of orchestral pieces, in celebration of the French composer Francois Couperin. I have heard hardly any music by this older composer, but evidently Ravel admired him.
The Tombeau that Ravel wrote, though, was fabulous. In contrast to the music of Bach and Wagner that I liked as a teenager, that was filled with the exalted German harmony that was easy to love, Ravel's music was light, and full of fairy filigree! You could imagine tiny fairy people dancing, skipping to this music.
I then learned that the few orchestral pieces in the orchestral Tombeau were an arrangement of an earlier piano work by Ravel, and that early version had more movements.
That did make sense, because Couperin was a composer of keyboard works, harpsichord, and maybe piano. I recently heard this piano (original) version, and I fell in love all over again.
I urge my readers to listen to this work for themselves; skip over the movements that aren't to your liking. There's nothing that says you have to like every movement of a multi-movement work. Here's a link to the piece I was listening to:
No comments:
Post a Comment