Maurice Ravel: Sonatine, M40

Joseph Maurice Ravel (1878 - 1937) was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with Impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term.In the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was internationally regarded as France’s
greatest living composer.
Born to a music-loving family, Ravel attended France’s premier music college, the Paris Conservatoire; he was not well regarded by its conservative establishment, whose biased treatment of him caused a scandal. After leaving the conservatoire, Ravel found his own way as a composer, developing a style of great clarity and incorporating elements of modernism, baroque, neoclassicism and, in his later works, jazz.
A slow and painstaking worker, Ravel composed fewer pieces than many of his contemporaries. Among his works to enter the repertoire are pieces for piano, chamber music, two piano concertos, ballet music, two operas and eight song cycles, together with orchestral and solo piano compositions.
Ravel’s inspiration for composing his Sonatine was a 1903 competition sponsored by a fine arts and literary magazine called ‘Weekly Critical Review’.
Two years later, Ravel completed the second and third movements and the Sonatine was issued in September 1905 by the Durand music publishing company in Paris, who had recently offered Ravel a lifetime annuity of 12,000 francs for the first right of refusal for his works. (Durand already had an identical contract with Debussy.) The modest and wise Ravel explained to his friend Calvocoressi that he preferred to accept only 6,000 francs “so as not to risk feeling compelled to turn out a greater amount of music”. From that point on, Durand was Ravel’s exclusive publisher and has held the copyright on his works until recently.
The Sonatine quickly became popular with audiences and Ravel performed the first two movements regularly on concert programmes across Europe and during his tour of America in 1928. (He did not often perform the last movement because he did not feel capable of playing it well enough.)
The Sonatine is Ravel’s homage to late eighteenth-century musical elegance and classical structure.
The last movement is a ‘tour de force’ of brilliant virtuosic writing for the piano. It is a perfect example of a toccata and is the musical descendant of the works of the French composers for the harpsichord (Rameau and Couperin), to whom Ravel felt spiritually connected. It is strikingly similar to Debussy’s Mouvement from the first book of ‘Images’ and the Toccata from his ‘Pour le Piano’ suite. Ravel would later enlarge the proportions of this sonatina’s toccata to become the Toccata of ‘Le tombeau de Couperin’, a work of Lisztian virtuosity.
This performance is by Stefano Ligoratti.
To accompany Ravel’s composition, we have selected appropriate paintings by Claude Monet.
Claude Monet (1840 - 1926) was a French painter and founder of impressionism painting. He is seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it. During his long career, he was the most consistent and prolific practitioner of impressionism’s philosophy of expressing one’s perceptions of nature, especially as applied to ‘plein air’ (outdoor) landscape painting.
In 1893, Monet, a passionate horticulturist, purchased land with a pond near his property in Giverny, intending to build something “for the pleasure of the eye and also for motifs to paint”. The result was his water-lily garden. In 1899, he began painting the water lilies that would occupy him continuously for the next 20 years of his life, being his last and “most ambitious” sequence of paintings. He had exhibited this first group of pictures of his garden at Giverny, devoted primarily to his Japanese bridge, in 1900.
Depictions of the water lilies, with alternating light and mirror-like reflections, became an integral part of his work. By the mid-1910s Monet had achieved “a completely new, fluid, and somewhat audacious style of painting in which the water-lily pond became the point of departure for an almost abstract art”. He would ultimately make over 250 paintings of the water lilies.
Monet’s final series of paintings depicts the pond in a set of mural-sized canvases where abstract renderings of plant and water emerge from broad strokes of colour and intricately built-up textures. Shortly after Monet died (a wealthy and well-respected man at the age of eighty-six), the French government installed his last water-lily series in specially constructed galleries at the Orangerie in Paris, where they remain today.
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