Pierre-Arnaud Dablemont, pianist » recordings

Ravel’s Scarbo (Gaspard de la nuit)

Pierre-Arnaud — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:40:34 +0000

After meeting with Ondine and picturing the gibbet, it’s time to talk about Scarbo, the last movement of Gaspard de la nuit, work I recorded for my first solo album last month. We all know Scarbo is terrifying from a pianistic point of view. Even if I played it extensively on many different stages, Scarbo still scares me and requires a special attention when included in a recital program.

At the beginning of the XXth century, Balakirev’s Islamey was THE most technically demanding piece ever written for piano. With Scarbo, Ravel decided to transcend Islamey’s virtuosity and write something much more difficult than Balakirev’s work. Well, he won his bet and by far. More than a hundred years after, Scarbo is still the most difficult piece in the piano standard repertoire.

Besides its virtuosity, it also appears to be one of the most beautiful, mysterious, colorful… work ever written. You get it: I love Scarbo and this piece has been fascinating me since I was 14.

Who is Scarbo? Scarbo is a little fiend or goblin, moving fast, disappearing and reappearing, frightening us. Ravel didn’t write a difficult piece for the sake of virtuosity. He wrote it in this way to express the “personnality” of Scarbo: scary, fast, unpredictable. So, you now understand the huge dynamic contrasts, the virtuosity and the constantly changing character of this work. Once again, Ravel perfectly used his talent to render Bertrand’s poem into music.

“I wanted to make a caricature of romanticism. Perhaps it got the better of me.” said Maurice Ravel on Scarbo.

Sure it did! And, dear Maurice, with Gaspard de la nuit you certainly wrote one of the most interesting work for piano solo if not THE most interesting one. You clearly broke down the barriers of technical possibilities and opened a new dimension in piano writing and performing.

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Le gibet (Gaspard de la nuit - Ravel) Today, we'll speak about another track of my upcoming album: Ravel's Le gibet. Le gibet, second movement of Gaspard de la nuit, [...]
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Le gibet (Gaspard de la nuit – Ravel)

Pierre-Arnaud — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 10:20:35 +0000

Today, we will pursue the exploration of my album’s Track list with Ravel’s Le gibet. Very slow, mesmerizing, Le gibet, central piece of Gaspard de la nuit, put the audience in a sort of cataleptic state. Ravel, like in the other pieces of his triptych, challenged himself and wrote a truly fascinating piece. And a damn hard work for the pianist.

Le gibet, what does this mean and what is the piece about? Gibet is the french word for the english gibbet. Le gibet is another poem from Bertrand’s Gaspard de la nuit. Let me reproduce here a translation of this poem:

Ah! Could what I her be the cold night wind yelping, or the hanged man uttering a sigh on the gallows fork?
Could it be some cricket singing from its hiding place in the moss and sterile ivy with which the forest covers its floor out of pity?
Could it be some fly hunting for prey and blowing its horn all around those ears deaf to the fanfare of the mort?
Could it be some cockchafer plucking a bloody hair from his bald scalp in its uneven flight?
Or could it be some spider embroidering a half-ell of muslin as a tie for that strangled neck?
It is the bell ringing in the walls of a city below the horizon, and the carcass of a hanged man reddened by the setting sun.

Once again, Ravel perfectly got the ambiance of the poem and mastered its musical transcription. Let’s focus on the last sentence: It is the bell ringing in the walls of a city below the horizon. The bell is clearly symbolized in the piece by a b flat octave ostinato running from the beginning to the end of the piece. Ravel’s challenge was to keep a pedal point of b flat for 152 bars (the whole piece). He didn’t fail at all and this ostinato is what makes this piece so hypnotic.

The fun part is the rhythm of this ostinato. In a so ecstatic piece, Ravel chose a rhythm of rumba for his ostinato (of course with a little distortion) and you don’t even notice it in this environment. The contrast is indeed funny (the rumba discovery is not from me, but from a friend composer: Steven Berryman). Here are the first three bars of the piece, with the bell pattern in red.

If you have been told there was a rumba in Le Gibet, would you have believed it? I didn’t, I really thought my friend lost it definitively! But when I looked at it closer… I found the rumba element.

Ravel’s music is always full of surprises and you never stop finding new elements in it. That’s a part of why this music is fabulous. No matter how long you’ve been playing it, there is always something you overlooked or missed. And I’m glad of it, because in ten years I still will be amazed by Gaspard de la nuit, and I’ll still have things to discover in it.

Ravel's Scarbo (Gaspard de la nuit) In previous posts, we talked about Ondine and the gibbet from Gaspard de la nuit, let's get today to the third and last movement [...]
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Ravel’s Ondine, timbre and basic acoustics

Pierre-Arnaud — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 18:25:09 +0000

Last week, I introduced you to the water spirit Ondine, main character of Ravel’s eponymous work. I also mentioned at the end of this short introduction I will talk today about the German physicist Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz, the author of the classic study of acoustic science. I’m not very sure you are familiar with this great guy. He discovered several things but what makes him interesting to me is his strong interest in physics of perception, and especially his On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music published in 1863. What’s in it? Roughly, he discovered harmonics and their importance. Not following me?

Each sound is the result of a vibration and consist of sine wave shaped oscillations. Sounds produced by an acoustic instrument or by singing consist of a fundamental frequency and overtones that are multiples of the frequency of the first harmonic. These multiples as a whole is called the harmonic series (see fig. below).

The human ear usually doesn’t perceive harmonics as separate notes. A musical tone composed of many harmonically related frequencies is perceived as one sound, the quality, or timbre of that sound being a result of the relative strengths of the individual harmonic frequencies. The timbre of an instrument is thus defined by its harmonic spectrum. For example, the characteristic timbre of a clarinet is a result of its very weak even (4th, 6th, 8th, …) harmonics.

Why did I say I would talk about Ravel if I don’t? Here it comes! We’re speaking about timbre, a synonym for color, the most important thing in Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit. I am about to reveal a well guarded secret: how Ravel literally creates new sophisticated colors with a single instrument called piano.

Remember the beginning of Ondine reproduced above? The “tremelo” is clearly a color pattern: Ravel doesn’t want us to detail each of the thirty-second notes but to give the illusion of a general color. He uses a C sharp major triad and adds a minor 6th (A). The key is C sharp Major, fundamental tone is C sharp, the C sharp major triad in C Sharp major represents the 4th,5th and 6th harmonics of the C sharp spectrum, nothing unusual. That would have been totally boring if Ravel had not added the minor sixth, the 13th harmonic of the C sharp spectrum. So, basically Ravel took the fundamental tone C sharp, and modify the color of this C sharp by reinforcing certain harmonics in his spectrum. But why adding the 13th harmonic?

First, he added the minor sixth to make the C# triad unstable and create movement. For me, this tremelo is an evocation of liquidity: a general pattern in motion with micro modifications sounds to me like flowing water. But he could have done this in other ways. Why precisely this 13th harmonic?

Acoustics specialists noticed that we reinforce the thirteenth harmonic in our voice to create a compassionate and loving tone. Have you ever noticed the shift in timbre when you speak to someone lovingly with great inner empathy? Putting emphasis on the 13th harmonic creates for the listener a feeling of warmth, comfort, kindness and presence. Exactly what Ravel wants to convey in the beginning of Ondine. Fascinating, isn’t it?

Balancing harmonics is the secret of the timbre: without this 13th harmonic, this beginning would have been totally blend. With a pattern consisting in four tones of the a single spectrum, Ravel created a color exactly matching the ambiance of Aloysius Bertrand’s poem. That’s genius.

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Ecoute, Ecoute! C’est moi, c’est Ondine (Ravel – Gaspard de la nuit)

Pierre-Arnaud — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 10:00:54 +0000

Today, We will pursue the exploration of my album’s Track list with Ravel. Not that we’re done with Janáček yet, believe me, but let’s take a little detour by one of my favorite pieces ever, Gaspard de la nuit. For those who know me close enough, they know how I adore this piece and that I could speak about it for hours. Written in 1908, during a very dark period of the composer’s life, it represents for me the quintessence of piano writing. From a technical point of view, of course, this dense triptych is still considered as the most difficult work for piano in the standard repertoire. But more than this, the piece shows such a large range of colors and emotions that it requires from the pianist a heart, sensitiveness, creativeness and imagination more than in any other piano work. The thing is: with Gaspard de la nuit, you can’t cheat. You can’t pretend to be anything but what you are.

The first piece of Gaspard de la nuit is Ondine. So my first question is: what is an ondine? To keep it short, an ondine is a water nymph or water spirit. Interesting fact about ondines: Ondines are said to be able to gain a soul by marrying a man and bearing his child. Other interesting fact about ondines: they are supposed to have a beautiful voice and sing to charm men. Ondines are popular characters in literature as well as in music (I’m thinking especially about Dvořák’s Rusálka as the perfect example).

Reading Aloysius Bertrand’s poem (epigraph to Ondine), we clearly understand the picture: An Ondine comes out of the lake, tries to charm a man. She’s singing a song telling him she’s a princess and has a marvellous liquid castle. Of course, she asks the man to marry her, but he refuses, saying he already loves a mortal. She “wept a few tears, burst out laughing and vanished in showers that formed white trickles down my blue windowpanes” (Aloysuis Bertrand).

Why am I telling this story? Because Gaspard de la nuit is program music. How could I deny that? Ravel sticks to the poem and expresses in music what Aloysius Bertrand expresses in words. Let’s take two easy examples.

Ondine begins with a sort of tremelo (right hand) and a beautiful melody (left hand).

In this beginning, you can make a connection with two elements qualifying Ondine : water (the “tremolos”) and her singing (the melody). The narrative content is here : Ravel describes the scene for us. In the background, water flows. In the foreground, Ondine is singing.

Let’s now take the last part of the poem : She [...] Burst out laughing and vanished in showers that formed white trickles down my blue windowpanes. Now, have a look at the last page of the score:

Isn’t this fast ascending arpeggio with a crescendo to fortissimo a musical burst of laughter? And aren’t the following descending arpeggiandos perfectly expressing Ondine vanishing in showers?

Ravel is generally considered to be one of the greatest impressionists. He didn’t like this categorization at all and wrote music far from being impressionist (Concerto in G for example) but in Ondine he uses fast movements of sounds in the pianissimo dynamic, explores timbres of the piano, finds new sound effects and place the colour of sound in the foreground. So typically impressionist.

Ravel choose in the first of Gaspard de la nuit to tell us the story of Ondine using his musical talent as a narrative technique and carefully selected his colors to depict the scene as he pictured it. That’s why, when listening to Ondine, I expect the pianist to be creative enough with sound effects, colors and textures to be able to tell me this dense story. That’s one of the challenge of Gaspard.

This was my first post about Ondine and in the next one, we’ll still talk about Ondine, but more specifically about Ravel’s experiments in this piece, featuring, as a guest star, Hermann von Helmholtz.

Ravel's Scarbo (Gaspard de la nuit) In previous posts, we talked about Ondine and the gibbet from Gaspard de la nuit, let's get today to the third and last movement [...]
Le gibet (Gaspard de la nuit - Ravel) Today, we'll speak about another track of my upcoming album: Ravel's Le gibet. Le gibet, second movement of Gaspard de la nuit, [...]
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Leoš Janáček: On an overgrown path

Pierre-Arnaud — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 17:00:56 +0000

As my recording sessions are getting closer, I’m completely focused on Janáček and Ravel’s work featured on the CD, namely On an overgrown path, In the mists and Gaspard de la nuit. This is a Czech/French program I choose for my first solo CD, really expressing who I am : despite the obvious Frenchness of my name, I feel equally close to each composer. Before hitting the studio in December, I wanted to write and share with you about the works I’ll be recording in two months and something. Allons-y! First post: Leoš Janáček’s On an overgrown path.

There is a deep bond between Janáček and me. I started playing his works more than a decade ago, before I left France, and I like to think my passion for his music somehow played a role in the decision of studying and living in the Czech Republic. Anyway, I’ll record this year the first series of On an overgrown path alongside In the mists. Why only the first series? Janáček began to write the second series of On an overgrown path in 1911, but instead of finishing this second cycle of memories from the past, he decided to express his current mental state. He thus completed In the mists in 1912, before he finished the second series of his miniatures for piano (not published during his lifetime). It was important for me to respect the chronological order, making In the mists a sort of conclusion to the first series. This is my way to underline how On an overgrown path and In the mists are intimately related.

On an overgrown path is the piano cycle starting a short period (1900-1912) in which Janáček wrote nearly all his piano works. The genesis of this work is quite complicated, and it took more than 10 years to Janáček to take it from its first note to its final shape. A little before 1900, Janáček received a letter from Josef Vavrá, asking him to contribute to the soon-to-be-published collection of harmonium pieces Slavic Melodies. It was not a coincidence at all if he asked Janáček: the Moravian composer was already using folk melodies as material for his works (cf. Moravian Folk Songs). We do not know how Janáček responded to this letter but Josef Vavrá, 3 years later (October 22th, 1900) wrote in a postcard sent to Janáček “I shall be glad to have your moods!”. The “moods” was a reference to the future On an overgrown path. At this time, the cycle had only six pieces : Our evenings, A blown-away leaf, The Frýdek Madonna, Good night, The barn owl has flown away! and a Piu mosso published after Janáček’s death. More important, the cycle was written for harmonium and not piano.

In 1908, Janáček expanded his cycle to nine pieces, for piano, discarding the Piu Mosso and adding 4 new pieces: Come with us!, Words fail!, In tears and a piece later deleted. Soon he added the 2 last pieces : They chattered like swallows and Unutterable anguish. The cycle was completed before summer 1908 [Remember this year, you'll see we'll speak about 1908 again]. After endless discussions with publishers, the cycle got finally published in 1911 as we now know it.

It took around 13 years to complete the first cycle of On an overgrown path with a lot of twists and turns, that’s what I call a difficult birth! Like the CD I’ll record, which could be an other explanation of why I wanted to record this particular work. But I already talked a lot about that, didn’t I? In my next post we’ll explore deeper the music itself and talk, among other things about its programmatic background. Stay tuned!

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Label record deals Pros and cons

Pierre-Arnaud — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 18:30:55 +0000

I’m sorry I haven’t written for such a long time! I had a lot going on. I will share with you today some thoughts about one of my current concerns. For several months, I have been thinking of a recording project I feel very strongly about. Except the program, the studio, and all the little hassles associated with the recording itself, the question of the label came up. Indie label, major or running my own label, all these solutions have their pros and cons. Let’s do a quick overview of these very different options to grasp the situation clearly.

Your first step towards a recording is a good definition of the project. Clearly, why do you want to record? For promotion? To be a worldwide famous star? Every artist has different expectations about recording and the solution must be tailored to his needs. In my case, I want to record because I love working in studios, because I have a program that is close to my heart and deserves to be heard by a wider audience than the concert one. Of course, I also need a CD as promotional support, I do not deny it.

My current experiments with independent labels and those of my colleagues are not very successful. The music market is going through a crisis. None of them provides conditions satisfying my own desires and needs, and the ratio time and investment vs. benefits is quite inconclusive. I still have to produce the CD on my own with a lot less freedom than via self-production while promotion and distribution remain uncertain. Apart from wasting sponsors’ money, which is not in my interest, I do not really understand the advantage of such a system, especially since the days of many independent labels are numbered: if the label collapses, you must take everything from scratch once again.

Majors: not an option for me right now. While distribution and promotion are almost perfect, it is a double edged sword and can hurt you very badly. I’m not big enough to negotiate a fabulous contract with a major label : I’ll be “washed-up” quickly. It is indeed very interesting to record for DG, Sony and others when you have access to their premium service. Not when you are one of the thousands average artists who recorded for them. In short, you don’t call them, they’ll call you, if they fell in love with you or if there is business to be done, in brief if you represent a profitable investment.

If running his own label was a really crazy idea for an independent artist a few decades ago, today many are doing well running their own company. The advantages are numerous: you can keep control over your career, control product quality and have an opportunity to truly express your unfettered musical vision. But it’s no bed of roses. It’s a titanic task, and promotion and distribution are difficult to handle when you start from scratch. But the development of new distribution channels and growth of music downloads are pushing us in that direction and help us to realize such projects. So why not?

Recording is not (except in very rare instances) a source of income anymore, the industry has substantially changed, technologies have changed, but we, classical musicians, are still thinking as we used to years ago. It is time for us to move on, to get a different perspective on the recording industry and finally create a business model serving the artists’ and music lovers’ interests.

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Recording is never so easy.

Pierre-Arnaud — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 06:00:21 +0000

To all those saying that recording is easy, I say, perhaps they should pay a visit to a studio. Of course, you can cut, past, redo, but it is not always an advantage.

The first shock when recording is a bit like the one you feel when hearing your own voice for the first time. Years later, I still find it hard to bear. Indeed, even if you have spent whole years working on planned works, you have never heard them from the microphones perspective. In short, you do not really know how it sounds like for the audience. You have an idea of it, you work so that it sounds as you want in the concert hall, but the microphone is the moment of truth! No one can be more objective than it is.

The editing process is a fantastic thing, but it destroys the music cohesion. Technically, you can edit almost anything, but musically, it does not always fit: different tempi, different dynamics, different intentions, outside noise, atmosphere… The editing can help correct some little mistakes, but overall, I avoid it. I would rather corroborate Samson François’ words: “let the bad notes, it’s nice.” Not always easy to find a balance between technical and musical perfection with an imperfect intermediary.

Recording is a lot of work: if certain imperfections are tolerated in a concert, the disc or recording can be heard several times: you can therefore be sure that there was at one time or another a mistake. It is thus necessary to make a perfect work, thus not human. A little example: Pollini’s recordings. I have long sought the origin of their coldness: it’s a consequence of their absolute perfection. You can not criticize Pollini’s recordings, there is nothing to say, it’s perfect, thus not very human. The audience has become accustomed to this superhuman perfection, and this superhuman perfection has become a standard, in studios or on stage. Too bad, I liked these pianists, who were more humans than playing machines, with their weaknesses, their points of view and their own style…

I digress. On monday, I sat at the piano with 4 microphones and my producer as only audience. Correcting, listening, repeating, improving, discussing, trying to relax a bit, we lived for one ultimate goal: producing a quality recording without stress since there is no planned release. I also had other aims: little or no editing and no sound correction. We will see what happens after post-production! I will share with you some of the tracks when available.

Till then, time to work!

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5 records I can’t live without

Pierre-Arnaud — Wed, 20 May 2009 06:00:14 +0000

After a comment from Piano Agitato in the French version of Recordings: a help or a hindrance to artistic creation?, I have been thinking about the records that have really affected me. Today, I have decided to make a selection of five of these. The choice was hard to make, but I have finally selected them from those I have listened to the most.

All these are equally important for me, which means I do not want to classify them. I have a special relationship to them because they made me discover or love something.

As I write these few lines, I’m listening to one of them: it is Joshua Bell, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic interpreting the violin concertos of Sibelius and Goldmark. My first encounter with the concerto of Sibelius…

But “pianistically” speaking, there are two fundamental records I listened to a lot (and still do): one of them gave me the love of Maurice Ravel, it is Samson François, André Cluytens and l’Orchestre de la Société des Conservatoires interpreting both Ravel’s concertos, and in addition Gaspard de la Nuit by Samson. The other record, it’s still Samson François, but this time with Louis Frémiaux and l’Orchestre de l’Opéra de Monte-Carlo in both Chopin’s concertos. If I sometimes find other wonderful versions, I always end up returning to them: I love this free playing with no inhibitions!

There is in my selection, an album that introduced me to the string quartet and chamber music: Schumann’s string quartets by Via Nova Quartet. Just the wonderful hornpipes in the final movement of the a minor quartet are enough to justify my choice.

My last selection is still about piano, but Ivo Pogorelich’s one this time and this famous record: Chopin’s sonata in b flat minor, Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit and Prokofiev’s Sixth sonata. Thanks to him, I have realized that there could always be something new to find in a work.

And you, do you know these records? Did they touch you?

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George Gershwin – Concerto in F

Pierre-Arnaud — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 06:00:48 +0000

Not much performed in Europe, this work would deserve much wider attention. George Gershwin’s Concerto in F is a work from the classical repertoire I still find neglected. Composed in 1925, this concerto will later influence Maurice Ravel to write his Concerto in G. Ravel advised Gershwin not to underestimate the importance of jazz, and it is exactly what he did in this totally jazzy concerto.

It is for this reason that I chose the version with Marcus Roberts at the piano, accompanied by his Trio, under the baton of the brilliant Seiji Osawa, interpreting in great shape the third movement of this concerto a la Marcus Roberts, perfectly capturing the spirit of Gershwin.

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How I discovered Albéniz

Pierre-Arnaud — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:08:00 +0000

… And along with him, a good part of Spanish classical music. This brings me back to a time long ago, some 17 years. At this time, I used to listen to radio a lot and at the same time, I was discovering Ravel’s works for piano. Until one day I chanced upon a public radio broadcast of a concert, which took place some months before at the La Roque d’Anthéron Festival. There, Spanish pianist Rafael Orozco was performing Albéniz’s complete Iberia.

Thanks to him, I fell in love with this music, so lilting, so colorful, by its wild and subtle rhythms. A pianist of great class was needed for such a work. Orozco wonderfully filled this role. From then on, I listened to many other versions by other pianists, but I have never experienced the same sensation again.

I would have loved to see him play, but Rafael Orozco left us too soon, in April 1996 at only 50 years old. Today, the little tape cassette on which I had recorded this concert is not readable anymore. Only the imperishable memory of a wonderful concert remains. However I would love to listen to this concert again and I’m hoping there might be somewhere (perhaps at France Musique, which broadcasted it) where to find this concert tape. Or maybe did someone record it?

The concert took place on Tuesday, August 4th, 1992 at 9:30 p.m, Parc du Château de Florans, during the La Roque d’Anthéron Festival: if someone knows where I could get this unpublished recording, please leave me a message.

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Pierre-Arnaud Dablemont, pianist » recordings

Ravel’s Scarbo (Gaspard de la nuit)

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Ravel’s Ondine, timbre and basic acoustics

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Ecoute, Ecoute! C’est moi, c’est Ondine (Ravel – Gaspard de la nuit)

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Leoš Janáček: On an overgrown path

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5 records I can’t live without

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