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)