Classical Music | Piano Music

Recorded on 11/24/2010, uploaded on 04/25/2011

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

When Maurice Ravel set out to compose his three-movement suite Gaspard de la Nuit, he remarked that his objective was to compose a piece of music more difficult than Mily Balakirev’s Islamey. To achieve this lavish technical display, Ravel looked to the florid style of Franz Liszt, which he had also done in his earlier Jeux d’eau of 1901. The suite was composed during 1908 and premiered on January 9, 1909 in Paris by Ricardo Viñes. Ravel based each of the suite’s movements on a poem by the French poet Aloysius Bertrand, whose work he had been introduced to by Viñes. Despite his early death and little success during his career, Bertrand became and inspiration for the early Symbolist poets, and his rather dark world echoed that of Edgar Allen Poe’s. The suite’s title, which Ravel borrowed from Bertrand, is an old French expression, derived from Persia, for the Devil.

Scarbo is the final piece of Gaspard de la Nuit, and the one in which Ravel aimed at surpassing the difficulties of Balakirev’s Islamey. It is a terribly demanding work, requiring the performer to execute with the utmost precision fast, repeated notes, wide-spanning and unusual arpeggiations, sudden changes in dynamics, and a scale in parallel seconds that would appear to owe its existence to Ravel’s own double-jointed thumb. Equally as terrifying as Ravel’s technical demands is Bertrand’s poem that inspired them. Prefaced with a quote from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Contes nocturnes (Nocturnal Tales), Scarbo depicts the impish and frightening antics of a goblin. He appears and disappears, then reappears again, without any explanation of how he moves about; he dances devilishly and his exaggerated shadow upon the wall transforms him into a terrifying monster—but then he suddenly disappears.       Joseph DuBose

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Scarbo, from Gaspard de la Nuit

Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit was inspired by Ravel's reading of Symbolist poet Aloysius Bertrand's, "Gaspard de la Nuit: Fantasies a la maniere de Rembrandt et de Callot," prose poems that express an infatuation with the bizarre and grotesque with decadent precision. Alfred Cortot called Ravel's "Gaspard de la Nuit" (1908) among "the most astonishing examples of interpretive virtuosity ever contrived by the industry of composers."

Ravel told his friend, composer Maurice Delage, that he wished to write something for piano that would be more difficult to play than Balakirev's "Islamey." If any one of its three movements shows that he succeeded it is "Scarbo." Imagining the terror that results from lying rigid, unable to move, as a vicious goblin flies through a darkened bedroom inspired Ravel to a breathtaking tour de force of sheer virtuosity.      Inna Faliks