Awesome Music / Maurice Ravel

The works of Maurice Ravel are an embarrassment of riches on the awesome front.

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• Boléro is one of a very few pieces of music that, while repetitive, lacks for nothing, and that amazing, soul-inflating, spirit-lifting ending. It's tied to a Moment of Awesome for the Winter Olympics: Torvill and Dean ice-danced to it and earned the sport's only perfect score, to date. It's also used in a memorable sequence from Allegro non Troppo satirising Fantasia's sequence for The Rite of Spring, as a planet's entire animal population is shown evolving from the dregs of a discarded bottle of Coca-Cola.
• Ravel's F major String Quartet is widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest - and most difficult - string quartets ever written. The opening sonata allegro starts off from a melody that shows up in various guises in all four movements. The strident scherzo opens with an angry pizzicato passage whose melody is expertly transformed for the more heartfelt slow interlude at its centre. The slow movement grows almost organically out of the melodic idea that initially seems to be just a harmonic transition from the second movement, which is eventually played in counterpoint with the first movement's main theme. And as ever, Ravel saves the best for last, the dizzying finale with extended passages in 5/4 and 5/8 time carrying the first movement theme to its zenith before hurtling toward a powerful block chord coda; the hushed chord just before the music finally finds the home key of F major two-thirds of the way through the movement is a heart-stopper.
• Le tombeau de Couperin, a six-movement suite in which each movement is dedicated to a friend of Ravel's (in one case, two brothers) who died in the trenches during World War I, stands as one of his masterworks for solo piano. Opening with an energetic but troubled Prelude that builds to a shimmering final gesture, it moves to an elaborate three-voice Fugue in which the subject is first introduced, then inverted, then interlaced with multiple stretti. The third movement is a haunting Forlane with forward-looking harmonies, while the following Rigaudon frames two boisterous C major passages around a solemn C minor centre. The charming Menuet alternates with a Musette anchored by a bagpipe-like drone and block chords, the melodies of both sections ingeniously uniting when the Menuet returns. But for pure awesome, the concluding Toccata, a pure adrenaline rush that keeps gathering steam for a triumphant E major coda, takes the crown. Ravel arranged four of the movements for orchestra; Hungarian pianist and conductor Zoltán Kocsis orchestrated the other two to complete an even more rich and varied take on the same material.
• Often overlooked is his exquisite and varied Mother Goose Suite (Ma Mère l'Oye), which ends with one of the most beautiful pieces of all time, Le Jardin Féerique.
• Ravel's two concerti for piano and orchestra were among the last works he completed before brain damage sustained in a taxi accident brought a premature end to his career, and they offer a tantalising glimpse of the direction his output might have taken had he remained able to compose.^note  Opinion remains divided as to the nature of his condition, and whether the injury caused a new condition or exacerbated an existing one; he could still hear music in his head, but lost the ability to convey it as either a performer or a composer.
  • The Piano Concerto in G major brackets one of the most gorgeous slow movements ever composed, the almost three-minute opening passage for solo piano constituting just one very long melodic idea,^note  As natural and fluid as it may sound, Ravel confessed to the work's dedicatee, pianist Marguerite Long, that he laboured long and hard over every measure, saying that "it nearly killed me!" with two blues/jazz-inspired wild rides (the first audibly taking cues from Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, composed several years earlier) to give us one of the early 20th century's masterpieces.
  • The Concerto in D major for the Left Hand is another masterwork, the beauty and drama of the music rising high above the "novelty factor" of only being written for one hand.^note  It was composed at the request of pianist Paul Wittgenstein (brother of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein), whose right arm had been amputated during World War I. Wittgenstein initially objected to the concerto's jazz influences, but grew to like it, although he incensed Ravel by making his own modifications when he played it for the first time in front of the composer. Ravel ordered Wittgenstein to play it as written in future, to which he reluctantly agreed. In an inversion of the G major concerto, the single movement of the left hand concerto frames a scherzo-like centre with two slower sections, and Ravel plays with the listener's sense of tempo and metre with polyrhythmic passages throughout.
• Gaspard de la Nuit, a three-movement suite for solo piano, is one of Ravel's most hauntingly beautiful works. "Gaspard" is derived from the Persian word for "guardian of the royal treasures", so the title of the suite hints at a guardian of the dark and mysterious, reflected in the otherworldly nature of all three pieces, each based on a poem by Aloysius Bertrand. From the rapid repeated three-note chords in the shimmering "Ondine", to the B-flat octave drone imitating a tolling bell as other melodies and countermelodies wind around it in the sinister "Le Gibet", to the double note major second scales and shrieking climaxes in the unpredictable "Scarbo", the suite is as technically formidable for the pianist as it is fascinating for the listener.^note  Fun fact for Diablo III fans: the eerie, unsettling music that plays in the Whimsyshire/Whimsydale level is a backwards MIDI recording of "Le Gibet" with other sounds dubbed over it.
• Lever du jour from Daphnis et Chloè amazes listeners with its beauty from the very first notes.

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