RAVEL. L Orchestre de la Suisse Romande Ernest Ansermet

Transcription

1 Eloq uence RAVEL Rapsodie espagnole Alborada del gracioso Pavane pour une infante défunte Valses nobles et sentimentales Ma mere l oye Daphnis et Chloé Le Tombeau de Couperin L Orchestre de la Suisse Romande Ernest Ansermet

2 MAURICE RAVEL ( ) CD Rapsodie espagnole 1 I Prélude à la nuit II Malagueña III Habanera IV Feria Alborada del gracioso Pavane pour une infante défunte 5 26 Valses nobles et sentimentales 7 1. Modéré; 2.Assez lent Modéré; 4. Assez animé Presque lent; 6. Assez vif Moins vif; 8. Epilogue 6 29 Ma mère l oye suite d orchestre! I Prélude et danse du rouet 6 II Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant 1 28 III Petit Poucet 2 56 $ IV Laideronnette, Impératrice des Pagodes 3 36 % V Les entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête 4 14 ^ VI Le jardin féerique 3 47

3 CD Daphnis et Chloé (complete ballet) Première partie 1 I Introduction et danse religieuse II Scène Danse générale III Scène Danse grotesque de Dorcon IV Danse légère et gracieuse de Daphnis V Scène Danse de Lyceion VI Nocturne Danse lente et mystérieuse 4 35 Deuxième partie 7 VII Introduction VIII Danse guerrière IX Danse suppliante de Chloé 5 31 Troisième partie 0 X Lever du jour 6 36! XI Pantomime 5 XII Danse générale 4 46 Le Tombeau de Couperin I Prélude 3 20 $ II Forlane 4 45 % III Menuet 4 40 ^ IV Rigaudon 3 08 Motet de Genève [Daphnis et Chloé] L Orchestre de la Suisse Romande Ernest Ansermet MONO RECORDINGS Total timing: Ernest Ansermet and Maurice Ravel On 2 April 1912 Ernest Ansermet was appointed conductor of the Kursaal orchestra in Montreux, taking over from Francisco de Lacerda, who had fallen ill. This was an unexpected stroke of fortune for the 29-year-old conductor, whose career had been in mathematics up until that point. For the first time he was to be responsible for a professional orchestra, one which hosted the great virtuosos of the time, and so he would be exposed to the stimulus of international musical life. In the same year, on 12 July, Ansermet moved to the villa La Pervenche in Clarens, a little town on the outskirts of Montreux. Whether this was chance or destiny, he could hardly have made a better choice. Although he did not know it, his neighbour was Stravinsky, hard at work on Le sacre du Printemps. In La Tour-de-Peilz, a nearby small town, Duparc was living in melancholy semi-retirement, and at the beginning of the following year Ravel came to Clarens to work with Stravinsky on the orchestration of the end of Mussorgsky s Khovanshchina. These two years in Montreux brought to an end by the outbreak of war in 1914, were packed with activity. All Ansermet s repertoire, which we shall return to, was there in embryo, especially his openness to contemporary music, French and Russian in particular. This is where he met Stravinsky, and as a result, Ravel. I used to include a lot of Russian music at the afternoon concerts which I conducted in the Kursaal: Rimsky, Borodin, Glinka, Dargomïzhsky, Glazunov, Liadov and Tchaikovsky. One day, this was in 1912, a small man came up at the end of one of these concerts it was Stravinsky. I had heard about him. He told me that he had been living next to me in Clarens, in the villa called Les Tilleuls, and that he was now with his family and his sister-in-law in the Hôtel du Châtelard, below Clarens station. From that day on we saw a lot of each other. I had his first symphony (in E flat) sent from Russia and included it in one of my concerts; I asked Stravinsky to conduct the Scherzo, a lovely movement, at a later concert. His whole family was there (Ernest Ansermet and Jean-Claude Piguet, Entretiens sur la musique). Much was to develop from these beginnings, both for the two men and for music in general. Compared to the lively cosmopolitan life of Montreux, Ansermet s house in Clarens was a welcoming place for his friends, thanks to his first wife, Marguerite. This was where Les Cahiers Vaudois came into being, where the

4 painters Auberjonois and Cingria and the writers Budry, Gilliard and, above all, C.-F. Ramuz would meet. Stravinsky found a sympathetic artistic atmosphere here, and his encounter with Ramuz led to Renard, Les Noces and The Soldier s Tale. Credit should also go to Ansermet for seeing at once what these two artists, apparently so different, had in common. Anne Ansermet, who was five years old at the time well remembers the visitors to La Pervenche as she describes in the book Ernest Ansermet, mon père, which she dedicated to her father: Almost all the bringers of music seemed to be small, at least those who came to La Pervenche were. The pianists Ricardo Viñes, Brˇailoiu and Nin were all small. Maurice Ravel, who came once or twice, had a very handsome face which could have been helped by a taller figure. I remember the first time I saw him. I had been woken up by the most awful din, which to my childish ears did not sound at all musical. It was so loud that I decided to come downstairs and, for once, complain. In the library (we didn t say salon, as that was too bourgeois ), filled with thick smoke, were Ravel and Stravinsky, battering the upright piano practically to death. Stravinsky was literally roaring and from time to time he would burst out laughing at what he heard (in his head, I imagine). Later I discovered that they were working on the orchestration of the end of Mussorgsky s Khovanshchina. Ansermet s friendship with Ravel lasted until the composer s death, as he describes in his Entretiens (Conversations) with Jean-Claude Piguet: I met Ravel in Clarens, before World War I. We had many discussions there, and I saw him often after the war, both in Paris, in connection with the Ballets Russes, and in Geneva, where he used to come to visit his uncle, the painter Ravel and his cousins, the Perrins. It was in Geneva, one day, that he asked me to play over some passages from La Valse with the orchestra before sending the score to the printers. Later, Ida Rubinstein asked me to conduct the performances which were to include Boléro. I was at her house when Ravel came with this piece which he had written for her, to play it on the piano. Unfortunately some tiresome union problems prevented me from conducting the premiere and at the last minute my place was taken by Straram. Later again I met him on the Bessières bridge in Lausanne, accompanied by his nurse. He was walking like an old man and although he recognised my face he could not put a name to it. He was suffering from the brain tumour which was to kill him, and he had lost his memory for names. [ ] That day he said to me, I ve never had so many ideas as now, but when I go to write them down, they disappear. So I followed Ravel s creative life from 1913 until the end, and I often talked with him about the artistic ideas, his tastes and the style and tempo of his works. Nevertheless, he was quite a mysterious man who hid his extreme sensitivity under a childish and capricious exterior. He liked paradoxes and tricks, like his friend Léon-Paul Farge, and one of the words which came most often to his lips was strange What might have remained only an acquaintanceship or a liking between Ravel and Ansermet was deepened by events which, despite the war, were very fortunate for the conductor s career. In 1915, on Stravinsky s recommendation, Diaghilev asked Ansermet to take over the orchestra of the Ballets Russes. Suddenly, the young conductor was propelled on to the international scene, and into the middle of an artistic enterprise that included some of the greatest creative minds of the century: there was Nijinsky, Massine and Karsavina for dance; Picasso, Braque, Bakst, Massine, Derain for sets and costumes, and for music there were Falla, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Poulenc, not forgetting Ravel, who had written Daphnis et Chloé for the company. Ansermet left the Ballets Russes in 1923 when he went to Argentina to conduct a series of summer concerts, prior to forming a national orchestra there with which he would spend ten years. In the meantime, in 1918, he had created the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in Geneva. This was his life s work, and he conducted the orchestra for fifty years, up to 1968, when he was 85 years old. But most of the works written for the Ballets Russes crossed into the concert hall and accompanied Ansermet all his life. He had become one of their most inspired and accurate interpreters, not simply because he had often been close to their creation and had been present at their birth, but because he had the measure of their power as works of art. It is interesting, in this respect, to see that Ravel s works were in the repertoire of the OSR from the very beginning Ma mère l Oye, for example, in 1918 and the other pieces followed very soon after their first performances, La Valse in 1921, Boléro in 1930, and so on. Much could be written on the subject of Ansermet s repertoire, but the most striking things that come across now are his consistency, his open-mindedness and his breadth. From his earliest days in Montreux there were three basic elements present: the first is the core repertoire which we all need Bach, Handel, Mozart and

5 Beethoven; then come the Romantic scores of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt and Wagner, and lastly contemporary music. These three elements had for Ansermet the nature of a basic psychological truth; they provided a source of balance in a concert, were a formative influence on an orchestra and a cultural treat for his audiences. They were a source of balance and enrichment too for Ansermet, who continued to develop his original concept. The last concert he gave, in December 1968, two months before he died, bears witness to this. It included Bach s Fourth Orchestral Suite, the first performance in French-speaking Switzerland of Bartók s Cantata Profana, Ansermet s own orchestration of Six Epigraphes antiques and Honegger s Cantate de Noël. In dealing with contemporary music, Ansermet would apply to it the same criteria he would to any work of art. He was much criticized for his approach and he explained himself clearly and openly on many occasions, particularly when he bade farewell to his audiences in 1968: When I began to conduct Honegger, Stravinsky, Hindemith and Bartók, most critics were against their music. But twenty years later their music has at last been understood. This is what happens: real music matures, just like every living thing (Ernest Ansermet, Ecrits sur la musique). And his comments on serial music were no less clear, to judge from what he wrote in 1963 in Les fondements de la musique dans la conscience humaine et autre écrits: As far as I am concerned, I have never done anything to prevent people playing serial music, but knowing its worth, I have done my duty in saving my listeners from disconcerting and useless experiences, regardless of the whim of the moment or what the journalists might say. This is not to say I am against contemporary music. I play it, but I make choices. I am not pessimistic, however, about music in the future. In my book I have shown that the path of tonality is endless, not in terms of musical language, but in terms of musical style. Creativity in terms of style is a matter for genius, and we must be resigned to the fact that geniuses are rare: the facility with which one can nowadays acquire what is called a compositional technique does not change anything. It is clear that Ansermet was a lively, not to say formidable writer. Throughout his career he took the greatest care when introducing works and composers to audiences, especially if they were contemporary. Here is what he wrote about Ravel: Much has been made of Ravel s Genevan connections to suggest that, as a composer, he was a sort of Swiss clockmaker. Such a description is flattering to us, and is certainly amusing if it refers to the chimes in L Heure espagnole. However, we must not take it too seriously. Ravel s technique is certainly ingenious and meticulous but the mechanisms he seems to latch on to are only there to produce poetry. Ravel s poetry is sometimes discreet, sometimes elliptical and often humorous, but it is always poetry. The poetic feeling in music is not in melodic or rhythmic figures, but gives rise to them; in Ravel it seems to crystallize in such figures and this is what is striking about his music. The poetry seems to be precipitated (in its chemical sense) in a single moment of feeling which expresses the whole emotion. This marks Ravel as a deeply French artist, having enlarged and expanded this characteristic of French musicality. Debussy was an innovator in this too; his material is fairly similar to Ravel s, but from it he created fluid forms, in order, in his words, to mix with people and things of good will. Ravel stands apart from the older composer in his return to Saint-Saëns, but with the same spirit of delicacy. It is within the very limits of Ravel s art that we find what I think is his essential characteristic: his authenticity. By this I mean that in every situation he accepts what is given. He could take pleasure in extremes, seeking out the rare and subtle, or, as he liked to say, the strange; but having accepted certain maxims he never broke them (Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire Lausanne, Fonds Ernest Ansermet. Isolated text, 1947). This insightful analysis of Ravel s art dates from If this is proof of a long time spent with the music and thinking about its essence, perhaps it is also a late reply, 21 years on, to Ravel s acknowledgement in his letter of 20 October 1921 to Ansermet: You understand La Valse perfectly. Jean-Jacque Rappin President of the Ernest Ansermet Association

6 Ernest Ansermet on Record The advent of stereo in the 1950s had a profound effect on listening habits: suddenly it was possible to have three-dimensional sound in one s own home, and the impression that performers were really present. This development in sound reproduction meant that many mono recordings immediately disappeared, depriving listeners of a startling number of firstrate performances. Certain great recordings were resurrected in the 1960s and 70s, enriched (as it was thought at the time) by the addition of artificial stereo, which made a separation of the sound into two channels. This was not at all satisfactory, and, paradoxically, it has been the high technology of the compact disc which has created the best sound for older recordings. Some performers took a close interest in new techniques of recording and sound reproduction, but Ansermet was not only interested, he was genuinely fascinated by the progress in recording. His unique historical position meant that he lived through all the creative developments in twentieth-century music, and consequently all the stages of recording as well. He made his first records in 1916 in New York, with the orchestra of the Ballets Russes, whose conductor he was at the time. Extracts from Stravinsky s The Firebird already featured in these first sessions. 52 years later, at the end of a phenomenal career in and out of the studio, he recorded the ballet complete for Decca, inspiring the players of the New Philharmonia and creating, to my mind, the definitive recording from a strictly interpretative point of view. As recording techniques evolved, from acoustic days to the early years of LPs and on to stereo, Ansermet recorded some works as many as four times. As we have seen, he had a real affinity with Ravel, and his performances have the value of authentic interpretations. Listening to these beautiful mono recordings allows us to appreciate Ansermet s special sound: of course, there is his concern for clarity and rhythmic impulse, but also those qualities which he always thought to lack; tenderness and a sense of poetry, as if his intellectual approach should have been at the expense of his artistic sensitivity. These recordings, unobtainable for several years, show us Ansermet in the prime of life, conducting an orchestra built for French music; here the timbres, acid and emotional at the same time, are in perfect harmony with Ravel s musical language. Like the great musician he was, Ansermet moves from the simplest nostalgia of the Pavane and Le Tombeau de Couperin, to the tawny colours of Alborado del gracioso, the classical elegance of the Valses nobles et sentimentales, arriving finally at his fantastic vision of Daphnis et Chloé. Listen to the Bacchanale (Danse générale) where Ansermet achieves a gripping effect of tension and sensuality with a fairly slow and unyielding tempo. Ansermet never forgot that this music was written for dance. His interpretations are not flashy: on the contrary, they are full of intelligence, respect and sensitivity to the score. François Hudry Translation: DECCA 1992 Kenneth Chalmers Recording producer: Victor Olof (Rapsodie, Alborada, Pavane, Valses, Ma mere l Oye, Daphnis, Tombeau) Recording engineers: Gil Went (Rapsodie, Valses, Tombeau); Gil Went, Cyril H. Baker (Alborada, Pavane); Arthur Haddy (Ma mere l Oye, Daphnis) Recording location: Victoria Hall, Geneva, Switzerland, March 1951 (Ma mere l Oye); October 1951 (Rapsodie, Alborada); October 1952 (Pavane, Daphnis); June 1953 (Valses, Tombeau) Eloquence series manager: Cyrus Meher-Homji Art direction: Chilu Tong Booklet editor: Bruce Raggatt

7