1908
Maurice RAVEL (1875-1937)
Gaspard de la nuit (1908) [24:55]
Sergei RACHMANINOV (1873-1943)
Piano Sonata No.1 in D minor, Op.28 (1908) [35:07]
Valentina Lisitsa (piano)
rec. 2017, Schaubühne, Lindenfels, Leipzig, Germany
NAÏVE V7583 [60:06]
Ravel subtitled his piano triptych Trois poèmes pour piano d'après Aloysius Bertrand. His pupil Henriette Faure said he expected her to have read all the fifty-one poems in Bertrand’s collection Gaspard de la nuit, not just the three he selected, before preparing her interpretation. It is especially welcome that the booklet at least prints these three, which Ravel had placed in the score. There also are good English translations and Bertrand’s literary superscriptions to the poems. This is Ravel’s only instrumental work inspired by poetry in this way, and the texts are an important key to the mood of each movement, as he was at pains to make clear. He even said that his “ambition was to say in notes what a poet expresses in words”.
Valentina Lisitsa certainly evokes the mood of each piece. Ondine portrays the legendary water sprite seeking human love. It has a notoriously tricky opening, a fast oscillating pattern for the right hand to be played quietly. These watery arpeggio shapes, swift ripples of demisemiquavers present almost throughout, are hard to control, and can overwhelm the melody or siren song. Lisitsa manages all this beautifully, suggesting an impressionistic aquatic fairy tale rather than a technical challenge overcome. Ravel even said “if you don’t count the exact number of rhythms in the opening figure, it doesn’t matter”, presumably as he was more concerned with the poetic effect.
Le Gibet also has its challenges. Some complex textures require both hands to switch rapidly between tasks. But the effect in this performance is a haunting one. Lisitsa brings the slow rock-steady rhythm Ravel insisted upon to the omnipresent bell motif of an octave B flat, the internal pedal around which intricate harmonies are woven.
Scarbo is Ravel’s famously deliberate attempt to surpass the technical hurdles of Balakirev’s Islamey, then thought among the most difficult of all piano pieces. The malevolent goblin of the title seems, it has been said, to have been at the composer’s side, urging him to even greater pianistic audacities. Lisitsa is suitably demonic and intense in a virtuoso account that is nonetheless rhythmically steady. She takes 10:20, rather more than Argerich’s 9:16 on her 1975 recording for DG, long a leading recommendation. Live recordings of Scarbo can be especially thrilling – all those notes with no retakes! Argerich live at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw in 1978 (EMI, 2000) flies through the piece, setting a speed record of exactly eight minutes. I suspect she got very cross at the bronchial outbursts just before she started Scarbo. Michelangeli, also live in London in 1959 (BBC Legends, 2002), makes a good case for steadiness at 9:55. A headlong tempo is actually not essential: the piece is marked modéré, after all. One fairly recent interpretation of Gaspard de la nuit I liked is that by Anna Vinnitskaya in 2011, also on Naïve, part of a solo piano Ravel collection.
Valentina Lisitsa was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and studied at the conservatory co-founded there by Rachmaninov. Her own record label is called “Queen of Rachmaninov”. She has recorded all the composer’s works for piano and orchestra. Her projects with Naïve in the near future include all the Rachmaninov solo piano works. It is a bold move to start with this mighty, and mightily demanding, First Sonata. Its great difficulty is something it shares with Ravel’s triptych, as it the composition date that gives the disc its title. Once long neglected, also by the composer, the sonata now appears on recital programmes and is recorded more often.
There is a programme based on the Faust legend, although Rachmaninov was inconsistent about it. He explained it to colleagues but never published it, despite claiming the programme would help the work be better understood. But the First Sonata makes perfect sense even without a programme, so logical is its unfolding, and so satisfying its form, with so much derived from its potent opening material.
Lisitsa delivers that opening cogently, and the striking gesture of the first bars is given at the marked alternating piano and forte, not over-dramatised with the sometimes heard pianissimo-fortissimo. The hypnotic second subject, resembling a Russian Orthodox chant, has just the right devotional quality. The dramatic progress of the movement, representing Faust, is compelling throughout its near fourteen minutes. The affecting slow movement is concerned with Gretchen in the Faust programme, but its warmth of sentiment here at times might also recall a balmy summer night on the composer’s country estate at Ivanovka. In the finale, Lisitsa builds tremendous momentum in this ride to the abyss which also refers to Rachmaninov’s trademark Dies irae (this is Mephistopheles’s movement, of course), right up to an emphatic handling of the coda.
Once again, Lisitsa has a serious rival in this work on the same label (Naïve, 2012): Nikolai Lugansky couples it with the composer’s Second Sonata in its shorter revised version from 1931. But Valentina Lisitsa has the technique and temperament in abundance for this piece. Hers is a substantial, eloquent and persuasive interpretation, clearly among the best.
There is a good booklet with those Bertrand poems and a note which compares the two compositions. The Bösendorfer piano sound is warm and well-focussed in a sympathetic acoustic, with plenty of sonic impact when needed. If this coupling appeals to you, you will find Lisitsa a splendid guide to both works.
Roy Westbrook
