8/11 – RAVISHING FRENCH: Maurice Ravel Trio for Violin, Cello, & Piano

Earlier in the 2009 season, we had a performance of one of the greatest piano trios of the 19th Century, the Mendelssohn Trio No. 1. Today we offer one of the 20th Century’s greatest works in the form, Maurice Ravel’s Trio in A Minor (the only piece he wrote for that combination of instruments).

There exist only eight Ravel chamber music compositions (two of which are quite brief pieces). As everything else he composed, they reflect the genius of a fertile, inventive, original, and fastidious mind.

In 1914, as he began work in earnest on the Trio, Ravel told a pupil, “I’ve written my trio. Now all I need are the themes.” He had wanted to write such a piece for some six years, but other projects had taken precedence. As he abandoned work on a proposed piano concerto based on Basque themes, he found that some of the material he envisioned originally for that work triggered elements for the trio.

We tend to think of Ravel as quintessentially French, but his mother was Basque, and his pride in that heritage was something he treasured throughout his life. (The Basque region of France, in the western Pyrenees, had its own language, historically connected with Iberian/Hispanic.)

The first movement, Modéré, begins with what Ravel referred to as a theme based on a Basque-flavored zortziko dance element. Standard sonata form basically drives the movement, but Ravel introduces his own individual touches. Pantoum, the title of the second movement’s scherzo, refers to a Malaysian verse form of four-line stanzas in which the first and third lines of one stanza are the second and third lines of the rest. Scholarship is divided as to whether or not Ravel really followed that scheme through the movement, but no matter – there’s no denying the music’s scintillation.

The Passacaille follows the classic passacaglia form, its Baroque roots introducing a repeating bass line (the opening eight-bar phrase) above which Ravel builds powerfully, then lets the music subside as the movement ends. Attention-getting violin arpeggios trigger the well-named Animé final movement, which features virtuoso writing, many time and mood changes, and a brilliant finale.

There is an almost orchestral character to the writing in Ravel’s Trio. He utilizes the extreme ranges of all three instruments, liberally using trills, tremolos, arpeggios, etc., and there are instances where he spaces the violin and ‘cello lines two octaves apart, with the right hand of the piano playing between them.

The Trio was being written just as World War I was breaking out and, after a somewhat slow start on the composition, Ravel found himself working on it, as he said, “with the sureness and lucidity of a madman,” so he could enlist in the army. He finished it in September, 1914, and wrote to Igor Stravinsky, “The idea that I should be leaving at once made me get through five months’ work in five weeks! My Trio is finished.” (In October of that year he became a nurse’s aide in the army, and in March 1916 became a volunteer truck driver for an artillery regiment.)

Ravel’s String Quartet (1902-3) is probably the best-known of his chamber music compositions, and after completing today’s Trio the composer compared the two works by telling his friend and biographer Roland-Manuel that without regret he would exchange the technical knowledge of the Trio for the “artless strength” in the earlier String Quartet.