Charles Owen and Katya Apekisheva piano 4 hands

Ravel: Mother Goose Suite  
Stravinsky:  Rite of Spring

Programme Notes

Ma mère l'oye (Mother Goose)                                           
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

Unmarried and childless though he remained, Ravel was completely at home with children. In particular, he became an unofficial uncle to Mimie and Jean, the son and daughter of his friends Cipa and Ida Godebski. Mimie in particular remembered that Ravel liked to sit her on his knee and tell her stories. It was only natural, then, that when he wrote a piano duet for the two children to play in 1908 it should have been a ‘Pavane for Sleeping Beauty’. Two years later, Ravel’s publisher, Jacques Durand heard them play it and urged him to write some more in the same vein. The five movements of the original suite were the result. Ravel later orchestrated and re-ordered them, and added two new movements and linking interludes, to produce a score for a ballet based on the story of Sleeping Beauty.

1. Pavane de la Belle au Bois Dormant (Sleeping Beauty’s Pavane), a gravely beautiful melody, sparingly accompanied.
2. Petit Poucet (Tom Thumb), who is wandering in the forest, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs to find his way out again. But birds come and eat them, leaving him lost and bewildered.
3. Laideronette, Impératrice des Pagodes (‘Little-Ugly-One’, Empress of the Pagodas), an example of the fascination with Indonesian gamelan music which Ravel shared with so many twentieth-century composers. The Empress steps into her bath, the cue for the pagodas (not the Japanese temples but tiny mythical creatures) to sing and play their instruments.
4. Les Entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête (Conversation between Beauty and the Beast), a slow waltz whose rhythm suggests a debt to Satie’s Gymnopédies. A soft glissando marks the Beast’s transformation into a handsome prince.
5. Le Jardin Féerique (The Fairy Garden), whose thoughtful opening gradually flowers into a joyful tumult. As it does so, we can perhaps sense the composer’s delight that the old magic can still weave its spell.

What makes Ravel’s fairy-tale world so appealing is its complete absence of condescension, archness or sentimentality. This, after all, is the man who once slipped away unnoticed from a party, and was later found in the nursery, deep in conversation with his host’s children.

Le sacre du printemps
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)

Part 1: The adoration of the earth. Introduction - Auguries of Spring (Dances of the Young Girls) - Ritual of Abduction - Spring Rounds - Games of the Rival Tribes - Procession of the Wise Elder - The Sage - Dance of the Earth.

Part 2: The sacrifice. Introduction - Mystic Circles of the Young Girls - Glorification of the Chosen One - Evocation of the Ancestors - Ritual Action of the Ancestors - Sacrificial Dance (The Chosen One).

In one of their published books of conversations, Stravinsky’s friend and colleague Robert Craft asked the composer what he loved most in Russia. Stravinsky answered “The violent Russian spring that seemed to begin in an hour and was like the whole earth cracking. That was the most wonderful event of every year of my childhood”. The idea of a violent spring may seem strange to those of us who live in more temperate parts of the world, but it provides a useful way of approaching a score which has lost none of its power to startle and exhilarate nearly one hundred years after its controversial première.

Following the huge success of The Firebird in 1910, the impresario Sergey Dyagilev, whose Ballets Russes company had staged it, naturally wanted a follow-up. Whilst finishing the score of The Firebird Stravinsky had already had a vision of what the new work would be about. The various accounts which he left of this vision are not completely consistent with one another, but they mostly centre on a pagan ritual in which a young girl dances herself to death. He began sketching the work, but found himself side-tracked by a different project entirely, the one that became Petrushka. It was only after this had been completed and staged that he was able to return to what was originally to be entitled ‘The Great Sacrifice’.

He had already approached his friend Nikolay Roerich, an archaeologist, painter, stage designer and expert on pre-historic Russia, for help with drafting a scenario. Roerich also appears to have drawn Stravinsky’s attention to at least some of the folk tunes he drew on in the score. Stravinsky’s later attempts to deny the existence of the score’s folk music elements have since been undermined by the publication of his sketches, which show a number of tunes carefully written out.

The riot that accompanied the first public performance at the Théâtre des Champs‐Elysées, Paris, on 29 May 1913, has become the stuff of legend. It was provoked as much by the novelty of Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography as by Stravinsky’s music (which was, in any case, barely audible above the commotion, by all accounts). Dyagilev had given out plenty of free tickets to ensure supporters for the new work, ready to shout down the opposition. According to Jean Cocteau (later to assume the role of figurehead for everything that was new in Parisian cultural life in the 1920s), “Innumerable shades of snobbery, super-snobbery and inverted snobbery were represented...The audience played the role that was written for it”. Dyagilev is said to have commented afterwards: “Exactly what I wanted.”

Just as Nijinsky turned on their head conventional ideas of ballet movement, so Stravinsky’s score re-thinks the relationship between melody, harmony and rhythm that had become the norm in European music over the previous two hundred years or so. In place of the tension and resolution of harmony, it is rhythm that drives the music forward. The consistently high level of dissonance becomes almost like a static backdrop to the propulsive effect of the games Stravinsky plays with unpredictable patterns of accents and constant changes of metre. He evokes Russia’s pre-historic past using the most sophisticated means at his disposal, the facet of the score that Debussy put his finger on when he described it as “primitive music with every modern convenience”.

The paradox is that a piece that unleashes so much that was new in Western music should, for its composer, have been a point beyond which he could not go. As the writer Stephen Walsh puts it: “Stravinsky seems to have had an immediate intuition that The Rite was an end rather than a beginning.” Within six years of the premiere, he was at work on the first major composition of his so-called ‘neo-classical’ period, Pulcinella. Turning a significant creative corner, he began directing his inquisitive gaze on the more recent European musical past that The Rite bypasses so emphatically.

Stravinsky composed the piano four-hands version before finishing the orchestral score and performed it with Debussy. It was in this form that the piece was first published (in 1913, the orchestral score not being published until 1921).

© Mike Wheeler, 2010

Note: Charles Owen and Katya Apekisheva were first asked to perform The Rite of Spring for 4 hands at the 2008 Leicester International Music Festival. It was hugely successful and has since become something of a party piece for a number of their recitals including one for Prince Charles. The Festival is delighted to reprise their performance today.