Classical Music | Violin Music

Recorded on 08/09/2009, uploaded on 12/02/2009

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Primarily engrossed in the opera L’Enfant et les sortilèges during the first half of the 1920s, Maurice Ravel nonetheless managed to produce a small number of chamber works—notably, the Sonata for violin and cello and Tzigane—in which the former served in part as the progenitor of the latter. The immensely talented Hungarian violin virtuoso Jelly d’Arányi, great-niece of the Romantic violinist and Brahms associate Joseph Joachim, had given a private performance of the Sonata for violin and cello. Ravel was greatly impressed with her playing, and is said to have kept d’Arányi up until sunrise playing gypsy tunes of her native Hungary. In return, Ravel composed Tzigane for violin and piano, dedicating the work to d’Arányi, who premiered the work in London on April 22, 1924.

The work’s title came from the French word for gypsy. Like many other gypsy- and Hungarian- inspired pieces, the “gypsy” quality of the work is but a stylization of something that at one time was authentic, like the Spanish-influenced music of Chabrier or Lalo, or the “janissary” music of Mozart and Beethoven. Far more interesting than the work’s title, however, is Ravel’s use of the luthéal, a novelty of Ravel’s day permitting the piano to produce different timbres in a manner akin to organ stops. One of these registrations was evocative of the cimbalom, an instrument commonly found in Eastern Europe and in gypsy music. The luthéal, however, suffered the same fate as the arpeggione, and Tzigane as Schubert’s sonata. Today, the work is heard either with its piano accompaniment or in the orchestral version that Ravel produced during the summer after its premiere.

Tzigane opens with a lengthy and fiery cadenza for the soloist, immediately evoking the lush and florid violin writing of the late Romantic period in addition to being vaguely reminiscent of the style of Paganini. Following the violin’s cadenza, the piano enters with its own, though far briefer and leading into the first thematic section. From thence on, a myriad of melodies, all with the fiery quality at once summoned in the cadenza, proceed in segmented fashion, pulling the tempo to and fro. A particularly striking grandioso section marks the ensuing frantic-paced accelerando that leads to the work’s exuberant conclusion.      Joseph DuBose