Piano Concerto in G major, M. 83

Program notes

About the Work

Ravel composed his G major Piano Concerto between 1929 and 1931, at the very end of his creative life, and he poured into it everything he had absorbed on his 1928 concert tour of the United States. There he heard a great deal of jazz and met George Gershwin, whose ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ he admired. The American experience left its mark all over the concerto’s outer movements, which crackle with blue notes, syncopation, jazzy slides, and the bright brass colours of the dance band. Ravel was explicit about his aim. A concerto, he insisted, should be ‘light-hearted and brilliant, and not aim at profundity or dramatic effects’, and he cited Mozart and Saint-Saëns as his models. This was to be entertainment of the highest craftsmanship, sparkling, witty and beautifully made, and he resisted the Romantic notion that a concerto must be a heroic struggle between soloist and orchestra.

He had, in fact, intended to play the solo part himself, and conceived the work partly as a vehicle for a grand farewell tour. But fatigue, failing health and the pressure of other work got in the way, and he handed the premiere to the French pianist Marguerite Long, who gave the first performance at the Salle Pleyel in Paris on 14 January 1932, with Ravel conducting the Orchestre Lamoureux. It was an immediate success and has remained one of the most beloved of all twentieth-century concertos, prized for the way it balances dazzle and tenderness.

That balance is the work’s secret. For all the jazz glitter of its fast movements, the heart of the concerto is its central Adagio assai, a long, serene, songful movement of extraordinary purity, utterly different in mood. Ravel labored over it more than over anything else in the score. He wrote its seemingly effortless, endless opening melody a bar or two at a time (‘How I worked over it bar by bar! It nearly killed me!’), and said he took as his model the Larghetto of Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, a lesson in how a long lyric line should breathe. The result sounds entirely spontaneous, a piano singing a slow, grave waltz-like tune over a quiet accompaniment, but it is the product of painstaking labour, art concealing art.

The outer movements draw on a second source as personal as the jazz: Ravel’s Basque heritage. He was born in the Basque country near the Spanish border, and the concerto’s brilliant, sun-struck energy carries echoes of that southern, dance-driven world alongside the American imports. Jazz from one side of the Atlantic and Basque dance from the European margin meet in the same bright, exact, glittering music, a characteristically Ravelian fusion in which nothing is heavy and everything is perfectly placed.

Scored for a modest orchestra used with maximum colour (prominent winds, harp, and a glinting percussion section), the concerto treats the piano less as a Romantic hero than as the brightest voice in a brilliant ensemble. It is short, a little over twenty minutes, and it wastes not a second. By the time he wrote it Ravel was a master of orchestral economy, and the G major Concerto is among the most concentrated demonstrations of his craft: dazzling on the surface, deeply felt at its core, and finished to a jeweller’s tolerance.

What to Listen For

The first movement opens with a literal crack, a whip-snap, that launches a fast, sun-bright tune, part Basque dance, part music-hall. Listen for the jazz inflections that follow: bluesy, bent notes; brassy slides in the trumpet and trombone; the piano spinning fast, glittering passagework against the orchestra’s swing. Ravel keeps changing the light, tossing the material between piano and winds, and the whole movement has the feel of a brilliant improvisation that is in fact controlled to the last note. Notice the harp and piano glissandos that flash across the texture like sunlight on water.

The slow movement, Adagio assai, is the emotional centre and the great surprise. The piano enters alone, unaccompanied, with a long, slow, song-like melody that seems simply to unspool, calm, grave, almost sad, over a gentle rocking pulse. This is the tune Ravel agonised over ‘bar by bar’; let it breathe, and notice how long it goes on before the orchestra even enters. When the winds do join, listen especially for the entry of the cor anglais (English horn) late in the movement, taking up the great melody while the piano decorates it with quiet, rippling filigree high above. It is one of the most ravishing passages in the whole repertoire: stillness and song, after the glitter of the opening.

The finale (Presto) snaps the spell instantly: a brief, explosive burst of chords and the music is off, a headlong, breathless dash of just under four minutes. Listen for the jazzy, march-like brass fanfares, the clattering percussion, the woodwinds skirling like a circus band, and the piano racing through it all in a brilliant moto perpetuo. Ravel builds the whole movement on a handful of insistent, repeated figures that whip past faster than the ear can quite hold them, and he ends, characteristically, not with a grand peroration but with a sudden, witty hammer-blow that stops the music dead. Blink and you have missed it; that abruptness is the joke, and the perfection.