Modéré
Pantoum. Assez vif
Passacaille. Très large
Final. Animé

Ravel spent the summer of 1914 hard at work on the Piano Trio in the French Basque village of Saint-Jean-de-Luz. The outbreak of World War I in August spurred him on to finish, and by September he was able to tell Stravinsky that ‘my Trio is finished’. It is one of the great works of the early twentieth-century chamber music repertoire. In his study of the genre, Basil Smallman writes that Ravel’s Trio ‘combines the brilliant string techniques of his early string quartet – double octave spacing, harmonics, tremolandi, and extended pizzicato passages and trills – with the powerful and evocative piano writing developed in Miroirs (1904 and Gaspard de la nuit in order to achieve some entirely new effects of colour and expression in trio-writing.’

The opening movement is based on a gently lopsided rhythm (two groups of three beats alternating with one group of two beats) derived from Basque folk music. The main idea is a wistful, modal theme (originally composed for a Basque-inspired piano concerto that Ravel sketched in 1912) that is twice whipped up into an exciting climax. The second movement is called ‘Pantoum’, a poetic form that takes its name from Malaysia but was made famous by French poets of the nineteenth century: Victor Hugo, Leconte de Lisle, Paul Verlaine and Charles Baudelaire (whose ‘Harmonie du soir’ is probably the most famous example of a pantoum, though he doesn’t quite stick to the rules). Brian Newbould has demonstrated that Ravel did more than use the name: he followed the model of a poetic pantoum, finding a musical equivalent. Newbould quotes from a definition of a pantoum: ‘the poem treats two themes of which the one serves as accompaniment to the other’ before showing that Ravel pulled off a remarkable trick here: ‘If all or most features of the pantoum are to be translated into a musical equivalent, then the undertaking must by its very nature present a special challenge to the composer’s powers of integration. Two themes are to be developed alternately, in a coherent fashion, but in such a way that the two strands of development may be extricated and reassembled as separate, intelligible entities. Ravel does in fact attempt this, and succeeds well enough to have left most listeners and commentators oblivious of his feat. [The first idea] is staccato, brittle, percussive in its cross-rhythms: [the second idea] is legato, surging and falling in short breaths.’ This dazzling movement has at its centre a contrasting section in a quite different time signature (four slow beats in a bar as opposed to three quick ones), but at the point where the opening music returns, Ravel combines it with the slow melody in a way that sounds effortless but is both rhythmically complex and brilliantly conceived. The slow movement is a Baroque form: a Passacaglia in which the music is founded on a repeating sequence of notes in the bass. Brahms used this form for the finale of his Fourth Symphony, and Ravel adapts it as an eight-bar repeating phrase, developed with obsessive tenacity, reaching a climax and then fading away. The Finale follows without a break. Ravel’s fabulously inventive use of instrumental colour is immediately apparent with shimmering arpeggios and tremolos on harmonics in the violin and cello, as the piano introduces the asymmetrical main theme, in 5/4 time, later interspersing bars in 7/4 time that extend the same musical idea. The movement ends in a pyrotechnic display of trills and arpeggios.

Nigel Simeone © 2010