- LUIS DIAS
A recital by the award-winning Moroccan-Hungarian concert pianist, arranger, artistic director, teacher at the Liszt Academy Budapest, Marouan Benabdallah is something to be grabbed with both hands, as those of you who have heard him before
will attest.
So when he reached out around the end of last month about the possibility of a performance in Goa, I worked hard to make it happen. Benabdallah plays to packed concert halls all over the world, even in the rest of India. But Goan audience numbers at a classical music concert that isn’t free of charge can be unpredictable, even for performers of stellar quality. One lives in hope that things will change for the better here in Goa. A concert of this calibre is a heaven-sent opportunity to everyone, for the serious student and teacher of music (and not just of the piano!) and for all of us, whether seasoned listeners of classical music or those recently introduced to it, or a first-timer.
We (Child’s Play India Foundation) are pleased to present Benabdallah in concert on February 9, 6.30 p.m. at Institute Menezes Braganza, Panaji. Donation passes are available at Furtados Music stores, and will also be available at the door shortly before the concert.
Benabdallah’s concert programmes are always thoughtfully curated, with a theme unifying
the whole.
This time round, his focus is on French Baroque composers, among them Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683 -1764), Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632 – 1687, Italian-French composer, dancer and instrumentalist, who is considered a master of the French Baroque music style) and Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace Royer (1703 -1755).
A highlight for me is ‘Le Tombeau de Couperin’ (literally ‘The Tomb of Couperin’), a suite for solo piano by the great French ‘Impressionist’ composer, pianist and conductor Joseph Maurice Ravel (1875 -1937), composed between 1914 and 1917.
The piece has a particular significance for me. I first heard it ‘from the inside’, as it were, playing violin in its evocatively orchestral version that Ravel wrote in 1919. Somewhere in the early 2000s, the ensemble I used to play in during my decade in the U.K. (Corinthian Chamber Orchestra based at St. James’ Piccadilly, central London) featured the work in its concert programme. Back then, the internet wasn’t as accessible, so I didn’t manage to hear the piece before our first rehearsal. It came alive at that first play-through, and the delicious wash of sounds, timbres, harmonies and harmonic shifts will remain with me. Today, even when I hear the piano version, I can ‘hear’ those gorgeous orchestral colours in my mind’s ear.
‘Tombeau’ in the title is a musical term popular from the 17th century, meaning “a piece written as
a memorial”.
The family Couperin (like the family Bach in Germany) was noted as a family of musicians for centuries. But the specific Couperin Ravel evoked in the title is thought to be “The Great” even in that distinguished family, François Couperin (1668 – 1733), contemporaneous with his “great” German counterpart Johann Sebastian
Bach (1685 – 1750).
Ravel stated that his intention was to pay homage more generally to the sensibilities of the Baroque French keyboard suite, not necessarily to imitate or pay tribute to Couperin himself in particular. This is reflected in the piece’s structure (in six movements), which imitates a traditional Baroque dance suite, but in the ‘Neoclassical’ style, with “piquant, ‘twinkling’ harmonies, modal melodies,
and dissonances.”
Neoclassicism was a Western cultural movement in the arts, literature, theatre, music and architecture that drew inspiration from
classical antiquity.
A cursory glance at a list of compositions by Ravel in general, and his piano works in particular, reveals a lifelong interest in dance and dance rhythms. They are liberally sprinkled with dance-imbued descriptive terms. At 20, he had composed ‘Menet antique’. Other works have ‘Ballet’, ‘Valse’, ‘Pavane’, the famous ‘Boléro’, ‘Habanera’, ‘Malagueña’, ‘Les bayadères’ (The Indian temple-dancers), ‘Ballade’, ‘Mazurka’, ‘Forlane’, ‘Allemande’, ‘Rigaudon’,
‘Sarabande’, ‘Tarantelle’.
For the New York City Ballet’s Ravel Festival to celebrate the composer’s birth centenary in 1975, the great Georgian-American ballet choreographer George Balanchine set the orchestral version of ‘Le Tombeau de Couperin’ for a new ballet. It had no principal roles, and Balanchine wrote that the ballet “doesn’t say anything beyond the combination of these dancers moving to Ravel’s lovely score”.
The original piano score has these six movements: Prélude; Fugue; Forlane (an Italian folk dance from the region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia); Rigaudon (French baroque dance with a lively duple meter); Menuet (or minuet, a courtly dance of French origin in ¾ time); and Toccata (literally “touched” in Italian, a virtuoso piece typically for keyboard or plucked string instrument, and here in Ravel’s hands a virtuosic perpetuum mobile in all but name).
Ravel was deeply traumatised by the First World War, in which he had served as an ambulance and munitions driver (he was deemed unfit for active military service due a hernia and “general weakness”), and in which many close friends and acquaintances lost their lives. He came within inches of losing his own life, driving hazardous equipment amidst intense night-time bombing.
Each movement is dedicated to one of those fallen. Prélude is in memory of First Lieutenant Jacques Charlot (transcriber of his ‘Ma mère l’oye’, ‘Mother Goose’ piano suite); Fugue is in memory of Second Lieutenant Jean Cruppi (to whose mother, Louise Cruppi, Ravel had dedicated his 1911 one-act opera ‘L’heure espagnole’); Forlane in memory of First Lieutenant Gabriel Deluc, a Basque painter; Rigaudon is in memory of Pierre and Pascal Gaudin (two brothers and childhood friends of Ravel, killed by the same shell in November 1914); Menuet is in memory of Jean Dreyfus, at whose home Ravel recuperated after he was demobilised; and Toccata is in memory of Captain Joseph de Marliave, musicologist (author of a book on Beethoven string quartets with an introduction by Gabriel Fauré) and husband of Marguerite Long, French pianist, pedagogue, lecturer, and an ambassador of French music, and a close friend of Ravel. Long gave the first performance of the whole work in 1919 and would programme it when she went on tour. Ravel also lost his mother in 1917, toward the end of the work’s creation.
For all the dedications however, the mood in ‘Le Tombeau de Couperin’is lighthearted and reflective, rather than sombre. He responded to this criticism by saying “The dead are sad enough, in their eternal silence.”
The frontispiece to the piano version of ‘Le Tombeau de Couperin’ (pictured) has the artwork of Ravel himself.
The forlane as a dance form was a hot topic around the time of the composition of ‘Le Tombeau de Couperin’. In 1913, Pope Pius X (1835-1914) declared the tango to be immoral, ‘dull’ and off-limits to Catholics. He recommended the forlana (forlane), a dance that had been popular from the late 1690s to about 1750, as its replacement. Talk about turning back the clock!
In a letter from 1914, Ravel wrote tongue-in-cheek that he was “transcribing a Forlane by Couperin and will see about getting it danced at the Vatican”.
To hear Ravel’s ‘Le Tombeau de Couperin’, a good 25 minutes or so of music, and much more, come to Benabdallah’s concert tomorrow.
