Classical Music | Piano Music

Maurice Ravel

Miroirs Play Play

Piano

Recorded on 12/29/2010, uploaded on 05/26/2011

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Miroirs ("Mirrors")

In 1905, Maurice Ravel, near the exact midpoint of his life, wrote Miroirs. In that music, he looked back to youthful and lasting piano successes, but looked ahead to the brilliant Impressionist works that make his music riveting. Miroirs preceded any of Debussy's epochal piano works, and claim attention for Ravel as pioneer, innovator and even magician. He wrote at the time that these pieces "…mark a rather considerable change in my harmonic evolution." He could also have mentioned the new complexity of his rhythms and the extraordinary subtlety of the virtuosic music he had written.

Looking forward and backward is an image apt for Ravel. Miroirs is a classical piece, a gloss on the austerity of the 18th century, yet its expanded tonality colors the music with exotic shades, and the virtuosity it demands sharply limits the number of pianists able to explore it. In other works, he found inspiration in older music, yet he was early identified as a flaming modernist.

The five sections of Miroirs describe imagined scenes. The first, "Night Moths," softly articulates the capricious movement of moths. In the second, "Sad Birds," a two-note motif is surrounded by flights of notes. In the third, Ravel imagines a boat coursing through waves, quiet places and abrupt dramatic bits. The bass murmurs about deep currents in the sea. In the fourth, "Alborada del Gracioso," the dramatic climax of the set, Ravel captures the Spanish mythos, its rhythms and guitar sounds, and shows off rapidly repeated notes. The finale, "Valley of the Bells," evokes a number of bells tolling in their own tempos, pitches and weights, sometimes near, sometimes afar. In this music, Ravel swiftly does away with traditional tonality without crossing into the troubled paths of atonalism. He finds his own poetic path amid sparkling and shimmering colors. Di Wu