SYMPHONIC DANCES FOR TWO PIANOS

1. Avec emportement
2. Lent. Sombre
3. Scherzando 

One of Debussy’s last compositions, En blanc et noir for two pianos was completed in June 1915. It was originally called ‘Caprices en blanc et noir’, the title under which it was first performed in January 1916 at a private concert in the Paris salon of the Princesse de Polignac (played by Walter Rummel and Thérèse Chaigneau). Later the same year, in December 1916, it was given under its definitive title by Debussy and Roger-Ducasse, at a concert given for the benefit of French prisoners of war. Fiercely patriotic, and unafraid to express his anti-German sentiments in time of war, Debussy prefaced each movement with a literary quotation. The first is from Jules Barbier and Michel Carré’s libretto for Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette: ‘He who stays in his place and does not dance, admits to disgrace’, almost certainly a bitter self-reflection: Debussy, greatly weakened by cancer and now very ill, was unable to take part in the ‘dance’ of fighting for France. Debussy’s music is less confrontational: dedicated to Serge Koussevitzky, it is essentially a kind of waltz, the writing brilliantly exploiting the potential of two pianos. The superscription for the second movement is taken from François Villon’s Ballade contre les ennemis de la France (written in 1461): ‘worthless is he … who would wish evil on the state of France!’ The dedication is a memorial to Jacques Charlot, ‘killed by the enemy on 3 March 1915’. Charlot was the nephew of Debussy’s publisher Jacques Durand, and the composer’s quiet rage can be heard at the start of this movement when low chords are interrupted by a dissonant chord followed by distant bugle calls. After a radiant section marked ‘calme’, what follows (‘sourdement tumultueux’) is hushed and disturbing, with the German chorale melody ‘Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott’ emerging from the texture. The final Scherzando is prefaced by a line from Charles d’Orléans: ‘Winter, you are nothing but a villain’ and it is dedicated to Igor Stravinsky. Though the music is sometimes playful, the mood is often equivocal, as are Debussy’s intentions: En blanc et noir is a bewitching combination of boldness and ambiguity. 

© Nigel Simeone 2026 

In a thought-provoking discussion of Ravel’s La Valse, the composer George Benjamin wrote: ‘Whether or not it was intended as a metaphor for the predicament of European civilization in the aftermath of the Great War, its one-movement design plots the birth, decay and destruction of a musical genre: the waltz.’ Ravel himself was at pains to distance the work – written in 1919–20 – from any such immediate associations. In his published preface to the score, he described the scene he had tried to evoke: ‘Drifting clouds give glimpses, through rifts, of couples waltzing. The clouds gradually scatter, and an immense hall can be seen, filled with a whirling crowd. The scene gradually becomes illuminated. The light of chandeliers bursts forth. An imperial court about 1885.’ But of all Ravel’s orchestral works, this is the most dissonant, brutal and strange: the swaying one-in-a-bar of the Viennese waltz becomes a sinister undertow at the start, before the main theme begins to emerge, seeming to crawl towards the light, and gradually gaining in confidence. But at the end, it is brutally crushed in a way that is both stunning and disturbing. Ravel’s own solo piano version emphasizes the percussive characteristics of the music, especially its rhythmic energy.

Nigel Simeone 2014 (c)

1. Non allegro
2. Andante con moto. Tempo di valse
3. Lento assai – Allegro vivace 

This is Rachmaninoff’s last major composition, completed in 1940. The Symphonic Dances were dedicated to Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra who gave the premiere on 3 January 1941. Though the two-piano version was finished first (in August 1940), its earliest known performance not given until August 1942 at a private event in Beverly Hills, California, when it was reportedly played by Rachmaninoff and Vladimir Horowitz. The original title was ‘Fantastic Dances’ with the movements called ‘Noon’, ‘Twilight’ and ‘Midnight’. Rachmaninoff decided to scrap these programmatic titles, and to emphasise the symphonic stature of the music was surely correct: this is powerful, imposing music which the Rachmaninoff authority Geoffrey Norris described as ‘a symphony in all but name.’ The opening of the first dance has a kind of stark energy that develops an impressive head of 

steam. A more reflective central section leads to a reprise of the opening, but this then dissolves into a beautiful coda where Rachmaninoff introduces a quotation of the main theme from his First Symphony: a work that had famously failed at its premiere but in which he still (rightly) had faith. This theme has hints of Orthodox church music – an influence to which the composer returns later in the work. The second movement is a beguiling and harmonically ambiguous waltz. While much of the finale dazzles with brilliant colour in its outer sections (with a lyrical interlude at its heart), it also includes prominent references to the Dies irae plainchant and a reworking of music from Rachmaninoff’s own All-Night Vigil. At the start of the thrilling coda, Rachmaninoff wrote on the orchestral version ‘Alleluia’, and it’s likely he intended this close to serve as a kind of joyous valediction. 

© Nigel Simeone 2026