Special Event: A Recital by
Seong-Jin Cho piano

A Recital by Seong-Jin Cho piano

By Matthew Mugmon

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Maurice Ravel in Ciboure, a Basque village in France near the Spanish border. It’s a moment that the celebrated South Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho marks with a program of Ravel’s complete solo piano works, compositions that Cho has admired since his early years. Given Ravel’s widely admired skill as a magnificent orchestrator, it’s easy to overlook his piano works—especially since he orchestrated several of them. In the hands of Maurice Ravel, the symphony orchestra became a dazzling instrument. While he certainly did his fair share of orchestral conducting, he is remembered fondly as an orchestrator (of his own works and those of others) thanks to his striking and subtle timbral combinations.

But Ravel’s attention to tone color emerges also on the piano, and his knack for sonic splendor reflected in part his fascination—shared with many French composers—for the sounds of Spain. Very shortly after Ravel’s birth, his Basque mother and Swiss father moved to Paris. His musical education began as a child, when he studied piano and composition. The keyboard remained central to Ravel’s musical identity; he composed many works for solo piano as well as two piano concertos, works for multiple pianos, and songs for piano with voice. From his father, Pierre Joseph Ravel, to the Spanish pianist Ricardo Viñes, to the Austrian-born pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm in World War I and for whom Ravel wrote his Piano Concerto for the Left Hand (1929–30), pianists were central to his network. Ravel set himself on a path to a career as a concert pianist early on, but such a career never materialized. Although he was an outstanding pianist while he studied at the Paris Conservatoire as a teenager, Ravel essentially failed out of his piano and harmony classes, and he left the Conservatoire in 1895 to focus on composition.

It was during this early period, in around 1893, that Ravel composed his Sérenade grotesque, a short work whose ironic title and initial score marking, “Très rude,” captures a certain insouciance that aligns with the aesthetic of composer Erik Satie (1866–1925). Ravel met Satie and the older Emmanuel Chabrier (1841–1894) around this time, and he admired both figures; Chabrier, best known for his orchestral rhapsody España, has been noted as a specific inspiration for Ravel’s Sérenade grotesque. The spiky opening is anything but elegant, and its pizzicatissimo instruction points to plucked string playing, an early indication of Ravel’s attention to a sense of orchestral color in the keyboard works. Gentler passages, including a fragment of a delicate songlike melody, do their best to interject, but the initial piquancy reasserts itself frequently and is always present throughout, even when in the background.

Less “rude,” and certainly less thorny, is another early work, the Menuet antique, whose title calls attention to its passages that resemble the counterpoint of the Baroque period. Even though this music predates neo-Classicism’s heyday in the 1920s, it has often been connected to that movement, which saw composers referring (often ironically) to the genres and forms of a bygone era. Ravel’s piece is a modern take on an old form, its extended harmonies and modal melodies sometimes adding solemnity to the atmosphere. But certain touches, like its distinct formal configuration as a minuet and trio and the appearance of a sudden turn to a major chord to conclude some sections (a trope known in the Baroque as the Picardy third), show how Ravel was reimagining older music through a new prism.

Ravel’s second stint at the Conservatoire, where he studied composition with Gabriel Fauré from 1897 to 1900, was no more successful in a traditional sense; Ravel essentially failed out again, and afterward, he even went on to compete in vain for the prestigious Prix de Rome multiple times. (Several years later, in 1913, Ravel reconnected with the Conservatoire with his very short Prélude, a piece for sight-reading that he produced on a commission from that institution.) It was during his final stint as a Conservatoire student in 1899 that Ravel composed one of his best known works, the Pavane for a Dead Princess. Like a minuet, a pavane is a dance that was popular in bygone times, but the pavane is particularly slow and solemn. The child in the work’s title—in this case a princess—is not a specific princess whom Ravel was writing a piece to mourn. The piece might rather be understood as an evocation of something that a princess would have danced centuries before at the Spanish court. Dignified and forlorn, this piece showcases Ravel’s signature style of delicate melodies and extended harmonies; more than a decade later, Ravel would publish an orchestration of the work.

More tumultuous is Ravel’s Jeux d’eau (1901), whose title is connected with a garden’s water features and thus could be translated as Fountains; apt comparisons have been made between this work and Franz Liszt’s Jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este (The Fountains of the Villa d’Este). A far cry from the restrained atmosphere of the pavane, Jeux d’eau captures a different kind of majesty, that of water’s unpredictability and dynamism. It does so right from the start with the piece’s quick opening figures. In painting a sonic picture of water throughout, Ravel makes generous use of the piano’s range and of rhythmic and textural intricacy.

Ravel composed his Sonatine from 1903 to 1905; like the Menuet antique and the Pavane for a Dead Princess, its title evokes an old form, this time a short three-movement piano work from the Classical period. The first movement, where a flowing melody with rapid accompaniment alternates with more pensive material, ends languidly. The second movement, labeled a minuet, has the contemplative character of much of the first movement, as well as an impressive (but brief) climax in the middle whose resplendence briefly surfaces again at the movement’s close. The fast, lively figures of the finale recall Jeux d’eau; rapid runs characterize most of the movement, interrupted only intermittently by a few short hymnlike passages.

At around the same time as his Sonatine, Ravel also composed his Miroirs, a suite in five movements, each of which is dedicated to a member of Ravel’s informal society of artists known as Les Apaches. (Ricardo Viñes, to whom the second movement of the piece is dedicated, premiered Miroirs in 1906.) Referring specifically to his treatment of harmony, Ravel later described this suite as a turning point that would “upset those musicians who till then had the least trouble in appreciating my style.” The first two movements, Noctuelles (Night Moths) and Oiseaux tristes (Sad Birds), take on the task of evoking the rapid movements and sounds of those flying creatures. Of the latter, Ravel wrote that it “evokes birds lost in the oppressiveness of a very dark forest during the hottest hours of summer,” and that it does so with “bird calls on a high, rather strident level with rapid arabesques, and by contrast the sombre, stifling atmosphere of the forest on a lower level, rather heavy and muted, with a lot of pedal and not much movement.” The third piece, Une barque sur l’océan (A Boat on the Ocean), is one of the two movements he would go on to orchestrate (this one in 1906). It reflects a return for Ravel to the subject of water, seen earlier in Jeux d’eau; in Une barque sur l’océan, fast arpeggios dominate the texture across several different sections. Alborado del gracioso (Morning Song of the Jester), which Ravel orchestrated in 1918, reflects the attraction to Spanish subjects that Ravel would continually reveal in his music. The last piece in this set, La vallée des cloches (The Valley of the Bells), conjures bells through its repeated open sonorities.

A hallmark of Ravel’s style in his piano works is the textural collision between rapid, sometimes frenzied figurations and more deliberate, chant-like melodies. This is on particular display in the resplendent Ondine, the first piece in Ravel’s technically demanding suite Gaspard de la nuit (Gaspard of the Night). The title of the 1908 suite points to a collection of poetry by the French Romantic writer Aloysius Bertrand. The title Ondine is a reference to water spirits, placing Ravel’s opener in the orbit of his earlier Jeux d’Eau and Une barque sur l’océan. By contrast, the second movement, Le gibet (“The Gallows”), is hauntingly somber and bleak. The dizzying finale, Scarbo (the name of a goblin in Bertrand’s text), perhaps has Noctuelles from Miroirs as its ancestor.

The next year in 1909, Ravel and five other notable French composers were asked to compose music in honor of Franz Joseph Haydn, who had died 100 years earlier. In all these pieces the five-note idea B-A-D-D-G was used as a common thread across the works to represent Haydn’s name. In Ravel’s specific case, he turned once again to a familiar dance form for his Menuet sur le nom de Haydn. The “Haydn” motive is first heard in the right hand at the start of the opening phrase, but much as Haydn played games with his listeners, Ravel soon playfully reverses the “Haydn” motive, presenting it as “Ndyah” (G-D-D-A-B); in a Haydn-like gesture, Ravel obscures the return of the opening phrase in the short piece’s second half by hiding it in a melodic sequence over a wash of chromaticism and a pedal point.

Ravel’s colleague Debussy wrote a waltz for the Haydn project. In 1911 Ravel himself turned to that dance for Valses nobles et sentimentales, which consists of eight short waltzes, all simultaneously accessible and tinged with surprising chromatic twists and turns. The opening movement is especially outgoing and unpredictable, balanced out by the slow, tender movement that follows. The third and fourth movements are playful, but yield to the more forlorn fifth. After a very brief sixth movement come the two substantial final movements; while the seventh would certainly have provided a resolute conclusion, the actual finale seems to fade into the infinite.

Shortly afterward, in 1913—the same year as his brief Prélude—Ravel composed two gentle tributes to composers whose music was important to his early development as a composer. In doing so he reveals—even proclaims—his own connections in late Romanticism. À la manière de Borodine is a mostly straightforward waltz, while À la manière de Chabrier imagines how Chabrier would have presented a paraphrase of the aria Faites-lui mes aveux, the flower aria from Act II of Charles Gounod’s Faust.

During World War I, Ravel served as a truck driver—and continued to compose. The suite Le tombeau de Couperin (The Tomb of Couperin) emerged from that period and continued his tendency to reflect on and pay homage to his artistic ancestors, in this case the French Baroque composer and keyboardist François Couperin. The work is shaped like a Baroque dance suite, and each movement is dedicated to the memory of a friend who died in the war. Swirling sixteenth notes propel the opening Prélude, which precedes the atmospheric Fugue; the Forlane is off-kilter in its melodic and harmonic wanderings, and the energetic Rigaudon precedes the delicate Minuet. The suite—along with Ravel’s entire output for solo piano—concludes with an athletic, glittering Toccata. He remained active as a composer after Le Tombeau de Couperin; many celebrated works, like La valse, Boléro, the opera L’enfant et les sortileges, and the two piano concertos were yet to come. But as a composer of solo piano compositions, Ravel had spoken his last word with Le Tombeau de Couperin. Fittingly, as with so many of his piano works, he had done so with a determined look back to the past.

— © Matthew Mugmon

Seong-Jin Cho has established himself as a leading pianist of his generation and one of the most distinctive artists on the current music scene. With innate musicality and consummate artistry, his thoughtful, poetic, virtuosic, and colorful playing combines panache with purity and is driven by an impressive natural sense of balance. Seong-Jin Cho caught the world’s attention in 2015 when he won first prize at the Chopin International Competition in Warsaw, and his career has rapidly ascended since. In 2023 Cho was awarded the prestigious Samsung Ho-Am Prize in the Arts. An artist in high demand, Cho works with the world’s most prestigious orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic, London Symphony, Concertgebouw, and Boston Symphony. In the 2024–25 season Seong-Jin Cho took up the mantle of artist-in-residence with the Berlin Philharmonic. Highly sought-after in recital, Seong-Jin Cho appears in the world’s most prestigious concert halls. This season he presents the complete solo piano music of Maurice Ravel at venues including the Wiener Konzerthaus, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Barbican Centre London, Celebrity Series at Boston Symphony Hall, Walt Disney Hall Los Angeles, and Carnegie Hall. Seong-Jin Cho’s latest recording for Deutsche Grammophon, which was released this spring, presents Ravel’s complete solo piano works and concertos together with the Boston Symphony and Andris Nelsons. Born in 1994 in Seoul, Seong-Jin Cho became the youngest-ever winner of Japan’s Hamamatsu International Piano Competition in 2009. He has studied with Michel Béroff and is now based in Berlin.