Ravel, an outsider?
Between 1900 and 1905, Maurice Ravel completed five attempts to win the Prix de Rome. The coveted prize rewarded the chosen composer with a four-year stay in Rome. None succeeded, and such a number of unsuccessful attempts only strengthened the thirty-year-old composer's anti-academic stance, favoring a certain outsider status that the composer would maintain in the musical Paris of those years.
The son of a Swiss father and a Basque mother, in 1907 Ravel made evident his closeness to his maternal heritage by giving life in the same year to two major works: his first opera, L'heure espagnole, and his first great work for orchestra, the Spanish Rhapsody.
The work has its genesis in a proverbial habanera for two pianos composed much earlier, in 1895, by a twenty-year-old Ravel, and warmly greeted by Claude Debussy, who also had his own fascination with Spain. Never published as an independent piece, in 1907 Ravel joined to the habanera a restful Prelude and two other dances: a Malagueña and a lively "feria" of carnival spirit, to form a symphonic suite of four sections.
The first version of the work was written for two pianos, and its orchestration was completed shortly before its premiere on March 15, 1908, at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris.
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| Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) |
The premiere was attended by friends and students of Ravel, who provided the necessary irreverence on a stage characterized by high prices and comfortable stalls. Ravel's admirers, naturally,
filled the gallery.
Movements
As already mentioned, the work is in four movements or sections:
00 Prélude à la nuit - trés moderé
05:23 Malaguena - Assez vif
07:55 Habanera - Assez lent et d'un rythme las
10:57 Fair - Assez animé
DePaul Symphony Orchestra Youth Orchestra, under the baton of American conductor Cliff Colnot.
