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    Ravel Sonata For Violin Piano

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    Jari Juhani Piper
    The document provides background on Maurice Ravel and his Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 in G major from 1927. It discusses how Ravel moved to a more sparse musical language after WWI. The sonata occupied Ravel for four years and shows this changed style, with textures that are spare and clipped. The second movement uses blues and was influenced by jazz, while the finale is feverish and textured.

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    Ravel Sonata For Violin Piano

    Uploaded by

    Jari Juhani Piper
    89 views1 page
    The document provides background on Maurice Ravel and his Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 in G major from 1927. It discusses how Ravel moved to a more sparse musical language after WWI. The sonata occupied Ravel for four years and shows this changed style, with textures that are spare and clipped. The second movement uses blues and was influenced by jazz, while the finale is feverish and textured.

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    Ravel sonata for Violin Piano program notes

    Original Title

    Ravel Sonata for Violin Piano (1)

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    The document provides background on Maurice Ravel and his Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 in G major from 1927. It discusses how Ravel moved to a more sparse musical language after WWI. The sonata occupied Ravel for four years and shows this changed style, with textures that are spare and clipped. The second movement uses blues and was influenced by jazz, while the finale is feverish and textured.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    89 views1 page

    Ravel Sonata For Violin Piano

    Uploaded by

    Jari Juhani Piper
    The document provides background on Maurice Ravel and his Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 in G major from 1927. It discusses how Ravel moved to a more sparse musical language after WWI. The sonata occupied Ravel for four years and shows this changed style, with textures that are spare and clipped. The second movement uses blues and was influenced by jazz, while the finale is feverish and textured.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
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    of 1

    PROGRAM

    NOTES by Steven Lowe



    MAURICE RAVEL
    Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 in G major, M. 77
    BORN: March 7, 1875, in Ciboure, France
    DIED: December 18, 1937, in Paris
    WORK COMPOSED: 1927

    Recoiling from the horrors of World War I many composers, including Maurice Ravel, searched
    for new modes of expression and style. Stravinsky and Hindemith sought rationality and a
    connection to the past in Neo-Classicism. Schoenberg and his disciples believed that through
    dodecaphony (aka the 12-tone system) they were reestablishing a bond with past German
    musical greatness and a promise for continuity in the future. French composers opted for
    urbanity and elegance. Ravel moved away from the opulence of Daphnis et Chlöe into a spare,
    economical musical language that resonated to Stravinsky and the entire Neo-Classic school.
    Among the earliest of his post-World War I efforts to redefine himself was the lean and
    astringent Sonata for Violin and Cello (1920–22). The following year began work on the Sonata
    for Violin and Piano, which occupied him for four years until completion in 1927. It too marks
    the composer’s change in style initiated by the immediately preceding violin/cello sonata. Like
    Alfred Hitchcock, who thought through the myriad details of a movie before beginning actual
    filming, Ravel planned out the new sonata in obsessive detail before putting pen to paper.

    The opening Allegretto starts with a brief introduction on the piano before the violin presents
    the first of several theme fragments that by design seem at odds with the music articulated by
    the keyboardist. Ravel noted that he composed the sonata for two “essentially incompatible
    instruments [that] accentuate the incompatibility to an even greater degree.” Textures
    throughout the movement are spare and clipped — the virtual antithesis to such earlier works
    as, say, the Pavane for a Dead Princess and Daphnis and Chlöe.

    Like his colleague Darius Milhaud and the French in general, Ravel was smitten and fascinated
    by American jazz, as can be inferred from the marking for the second movement — Blues.
    Moderato. He uses the violin as a surrogate saxophone (an instrument used by many French
    “classical” composers) and the piano as a would-be guitar. As with the first movement, the
    music has at times a hard-edged quality, a herky-jerky rhythmic jauntiness that captures the
    post-traumatic frenzy of the still-fresh painful memories of the Great War.

    A Perpetuum mobile marked Allegro serves as the Sonata’s febrile and astringently textured
    finale. Here Ravel — a pianist, though not a virtuoso — gives the violin a clear leadership role in
    pursuit of vibrant fiddling, limiting the piano to an accompanying, though by no means
    unchallenging role.

    © 2016 Steven Lowe

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