Sunday August 17th
Maurice Ravel
Une barque sur l’océan
Joseph Maurice Ravel was born at Ciboure, Basses Pyrénées, France, on March 7, 1875, and died in Paris on December 28, 1937. Une barque sur l’océan was composed as the third movement of a solo piano collection, Miroirs, in 1904–05. In 1906 Ravel transcribed the movement for orchestra. The score calls for three flutes (second and third doubling piccolo), two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, trombones, tuba, celesta, timpani, percussion, two harps, and strings.
Ravel’s Miroirs consists of five movements for solo piano, of which he soon selected the third movement (A boat on the ocean) for an orchestral treatment. This was a common practice throughout his career: he demonstrated an extraordinary refinement in converting pianistic ideas into orchestral ones. The often-dazzling results show Ravel's meticulous work ethic, as writing for each orchestral instrument requires its own specific technique.
The constant restlessness of a body of water appears in several musical forms: constant rapid arpeggios moving up and down in wave-like motion; descending melodic figures in changing metrical patterns; extended trills to suggest the sparkle of sunlight on the water.
Ravel invented a wide range of techniques, from delicate mixtures of sound colors to massive blocks. When this work was premiered in 1907 it attracted negative responses from many critics, who found his treatment of standard instruments incomprehensible. One critic could not imagine using mutes on the trumpets throughout an entire piece. Yet such degrees of delicate variety are what have earned Ravel his reputation as a master of orchestration, a magician of sound. — © Steven Ledbetter
Mstislav Rostropovich, 1999 (photograph) by Nancy Lee Katz. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, CC BY-NC-ND.
Witold Lutosławski
Cello Concerto
Witold Lutosławski was born in Warsaw on January 25, 1913, and died in the same city on February 7, 1994. Composed between 1969 and 1970, the Concerto was premiered in London on October 14, 1970, by its dedicatee, Mstistlav Rostropovich, with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and conductor Edward Downes. In addition to solo cello, the piece is scored for three flutes (second and third doubling piccolo), three oboes, three clarinets (third doubling bass clarinet), three bassoons (third doubling contrabassoon), four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, celesta, and strings.
“The Italian concertare means to join together or to agree, while the related Latin concertare means to fight or contend. This duality of cooperation and contention lies at the heart of the concerto principle.” So Michael Thomas Roeder’s A History of the Concerto introduces the tension that is especially escalated in Witold Lutosławski’s Cello Concerto. A towering work of the cello repertoire, dedicated to and championed by Mstislav Rostropovich, it is a defining work of Lutosławski’s mature style and his first solo concerto. Rostropovich saw the work as a representation of the struggle between the individual and a repressive society, describing one moment in particular as “the Central Committee at full strength.”
Indeed, conflict, at a societal and geopolitical scale, had been a defining feature of Lutosławski’s life. Born in Warsaw in 1913, his family fled for Moscow in 1915 to escape the approaching German armies. His father and uncle were active in the struggle for Polish independence, for which the new Bolshevik government executed them in 1918. What was left of the family returned to (a now-independent) Poland the next year, and Lutosławski soon began his musical studies—first piano, then violin, and finally composition.
His first orchestral work, the Symphonic Variations, was performed in 1939. But German invasion soon disturbed his life again—mobilized for service, he was captured but escaped and returned to Warsaw, where he and fellow composer-pianist Andrzej Panufnik performed duos in cafés—the only venues available to them. After the war, Polish cultural life was dominated by a Stalinist imperative to employ socialist realism: work with a happy, uplifting message instead of abstract Western aesthetics condemned as “formalist” and “degenerate.”
Stalin’s death began a cultural thaw symbolized by the Warsaw Autumn Festival, which played an important role in avant-garde discourse between Poland and the West beginning in 1956. Lutosławski would later say that “Poles are not universally considered a particularly musical people. They are, however, undeniably endowed with curiosity,” a curiosity which gave rise to important works such as Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima and Lutosławski’s own Jeux Venetiens, in which the composer began developing his aleatoric technique.
In Latin, an aleator is a dice player; Lutosławski’s technique was inspired by John Cage, whose works at this time were created through chance-based procedures. Music of Changes, an important example of this approach, was performed at the 1958 Warsaw Autumn Festival. Cage’s practice had a philosophical basis—seeking “a music free from one’s memory and imagination”—whereas Lutosławski’s had a practical aim. By providing fully notated music to performers but not specifying how, exactly, they are to synchronize their actions, the composer gives them more freedom for expressive interpretation while also achieving a densely layered sound with ease.
This technique has a particularly strong effect in the present Concerto, in which lightly coordinated masses of orchestral sound provide a foil to the cello. But before the orchestra enters, there is a long passage for cello alone that begins with (and repeatedly returns to) the open D string, creating a sense of “complete relaxation, or even ‘absentmindedness,’” as Lutosławski wrote to Rostropovich. This state is interrupted by moments of concentration on more elaborate musical events. One of these is labeled “marziale,” but the composer writes that “naturally ‘marziale’ is to be understood figuratively. It is indeed a very unreal march.”
Perhaps “marziale” really is figurative, though to a composer whose home had been repeatedly invaded and who had recently witnessed the Soviet military on the streets of Czechoslovakia, such a lofty attitude seems dubious. Lutosławski had lived through a time where political speech was deeply dangerous—as his family knew from experience.
The introduction ends with the cello being shouted down by the trumpets—be they the Central Committee or no—before proceeding (without pause) to a movement titled “Four Episodes.” Each episode follows a similar path, with the cello “‘inviting’ a few instruments to a dialogue, which subsequently develops into a more animated music. Brasses put an end to it,” as in the introduction.
In response to their fifth interruption, the cello “becomes ‘serious’ too,” in the third movement, Cantilena, which highlights Lutosławski’s finely tuned melodic and harmonic craft. Determined to work beyond the confines of tonality but also the confines of serialism—which was dominating the musical avant-garde—Lutosławski devised his own systems. The cello’s melody uses a limited number of intervals in each section: at first, only minor and major seconds; then, major seconds and perfect fifths—and so on, so that there is consistency and progression to the melody’s outpouring.
This has been a long section of the Italian concertare, with the soloist and orchestra in agreement and literally joined together in its closing melody. But the Latin concertare responds in force, the brasses joined by winds and percussion in an angry intervention. The Finale is built on this conflict: the lone cello’s energetic heroism against the massed ranks of the orchestra. In the end, is the repeated note a cry of victory or a cry for help? But perhaps hearing it in either of these ways is to disrespect the composer’s wishes. In his words, “from this partly literary description . . . one could infer that the Cello Concerto has something in common with program, or even illustrative, music. Yet nothing is more alien to my intention.”
— © Joel Rust
Tennis at Hertingfordbury, 1910 (oil on canvas) by Spencer Frederick Gore. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund.
Claude Debussy
Jeux
Achille-Claude Debussy was born on August 22, 1862, in St. Germain-en-Laye, and died on March 25, 1918, in Paris. He composed Jeux in 1912–13 for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, with choreography by Vaclav Nijinsky. It was first performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris on May 15, 1913, conducted by Pierre Monteux. Jeux is generously scored for two flutes, two piccolos, three oboes and English horn, three clarinets and bass clarinet, three bassoons and sarrusophone, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps, celesta, and strings.
When it comes to infamous world premieres of ballets that took place in the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris in May 1913, courtesy of impresario Sergei Diaghilev, dancer and choreographer Vaclav Nijinsky, and conductor Pierre Monteux, one springs to mind first: Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, on May 29. A certain exaggerated mythology surrounds that admittedly eventful performance—a mythology that includes frequently repeated and demonstrably false claims that the piece’s modern style caused a riot.
Not long before that premiere, on May 15, the same group—in the same theater, which opened that spring—introduced another work, one with its own mythology: Jeux, by Stravinsky’s good friend and admirer Claude Debussy. By the time Diaghilev commissioned Debussy in 1912 to compose Jeux, Debussy was a leading musical figure in Paris, known well for Impressionist music which foregrounded hazy harmonies, languid melodies, and indistinct rhythms. Debussy had also by that time established a relationship with the Ballets Russes, which in May 1912 performed Nijinsky’s choreography of Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, his celebrated orchestral work from the 1890s. As for Jeux’s mythology: unverified accounts claim Debussy rejected the proposed narrative for the ballet as “idiotic and unmusical,” and that he only agreed to compose it after being promised more money. Whatever his initial response, Debussy did ultimately write a short ballet on a playful subject: three youths lose a tennis ball, play various games, and ultimately kiss before a tennis ball is thrown toward them and they retreat.
The introduction of Jeux is a slow and mysterious tapestry of sustained notes, followed by a faster passage and then a return to the atmosphere of the opening measures. Then, with more frantic material, the curtain opens on a park, leading to a luminous orchestral eruption—the moment when, as described in the score, “a tennis ball falls on the stage.” Soon “a young man, in tennis dress, holding his racket high, leaps across the stage,” marked in the score by ascending harp figures. Then, “there appear two timid and curious girls,” their arrival signaled by a nervous, tremolo-laden melodic fragment that soon transforms into dance music. Percussion imitates rustling leaves as the man spies on them; after a disconcerting passage, he dances, and in a tender section, he and the first woman dance together and kiss; a sighing melody in the strings punctuates their passion, contrasting with short staccato motives for the second woman’s jealousy. Oboes and English horn lead her “ironic and mocking dance,” and the man, seeing this as an invitation, begins to dance with her; “their dance becomes more affectionate” and reaches a fever pitch, but suddenly, the first woman, “holding her face in her hands, tries to run away,” suggested by scampering in the violins. An atmospheric passage reminiscent of the introduction captures her temporary sadness, but ultimately, all three dance in an extended section that seems to run the gamut of emotions, culminating in a “triple kiss.” A quick, rapid descending figure in the flutes and clarinets points to the new appearance of a tennis ball, prompting all three to flee. A quiet final passage concludes with a brief chuckle.
While Jeux is admired today, “no score passed more unnoticed” in its day, as the musicologist François Lesure put it. Though the music did receive some critical praise after its premiere, the piece certainly did not ignite the same passionate response as Stravinsky’s Rite soon would. But as influential as Stravinsky’s composition was in the twentieth century, Jeux—that other work first heard in Paris in May 1913—would develop several Modernist admirers, including Francis Poulenc and the avant-garde figures Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. — © Matthew Mugmon
Spanish Peasants Dancing the Bolero, 1836 (lithograph) by John Frederick Lewis. The Art Institute of Chicago, Dorothy Braude Edinburg Collection.
Maurice Ravel
Boléro
Ravel composed Boléro in 1928 for the dancer Ida Rubinstein; the piece was premiered at the Paris Opera on November 22 of that year. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes (second doubling oboe d’amore) and English horn, two clarinets (second doubling E-flat clarinet) and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba, soprano saxophone, tenor saxophone, timpani, percussion, celesta, harp, and strings.
Joseph Maurice Ravel is a widely admired and well-biographed composer. We know his whereabouts, sometimes down to the hour, on virtually every day of his adult life: his attendance at the infamous premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in Paris; his near-obsession with Edgar Allan Poe; and most happily, nearly everything he composed. His two one-act operas, his only contributions to the genre, are both masterpieces. Gaspard de la Nuit is a renowned piano work (and has been programmed here in Aspen in celebration of the composer’s 150th anniversary year), and his ballet Daphnis et Chloé remains among the most ravishing ever penned.
Ravel’s 1928 composition for large orchestra, Boléro, has its own life. It was Ravel’s experiment in newness, an étude with a presence in popular culture that is as rare as it is undeniable. Audiences adore Boléro.
But what about the people who program, conduct, and play this music? How do they feel about it? The gap between the love of an audience and the feelings of musicians regarding Boléro might be surprising, though over-programming may be more responsible than anything else for the mismatch. Musicians love when audiences love what they do, and that includes Boléro. But, while musicians want Boléro to bring audiences to discover new works, those audiences seem to say that they don’t want to explore works like Boléro—they’d rather hear Boléro again.
This is the complicated result of many realities. Firstly, in the strangely caricatured hierarchy of values enforced in classical music culture, pure music holds the highest position. Then come tone poems, then concertos, orchestral song cycles, oratorios, operas, ballets, and finally . . . pops concerts.
Sitting astride this never-stated-out-loud hierarchy is Boléro, which is both ballet music and played at pops concerts (and so doubly disadvantaged). But for some audiences, Boléro is often the high point of their experience. Hence the strange gap.
So what is Boléro? The narrative, printed in the premiere program in 1928, was this:
In a tavern in Spain, people dance beneath a brass lamp hung from the ceiling. The crowd cheers a female dancer, who leaps onto a long table and her steps become more and more animated.
Less than a year later, Arturo Toscanini conducted Boléro in its American premiere with the New York Philharmonic on November 14, 1929. The following spring, on tour in Paris, Toscanini conducted the work with Ravel in the audience; the composer was so infuriated at Toscanini’s fast tempo that he refused to take a bow.
Tempo, indeed, takes on an outsized importance in performances of Boléro. Ravel writes a tempo of seventy-two beats per minute, but his own recording is slightly slower (sixty-six or sixty-seven). Many conductors have taken it much slower, even as slow as fifty-five, and it has been heard as fast as eighty-four, which is where Toscanini was headed. This range translates to the difference between a performance that lasts fifteen minutes and fifty seconds, and one that lasts fourteen minutes—a major difference for so brief a work. Stokowski’s 1940 recording is more than a minute shorter than Toscanini’s, and one of Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache’s five commercial recordings clocks in at a whopping nineteen minutes. All for a piece that hardly needs a performative conductor at all.
Of Boléro, Ravel has written, “I have done exactly what I have set out to do, and it is for listeners to take it or leave it.” And listeners have taken it far. In Blake Edwards’s 1979 film 10, for example (which featured Julie Andrews and created the brief stardom of Bo Derek), Boléro plays the film’s actual starring role as the ultimate sonic aphrodisiac. The soundtrack of the film sold almost as well as the film itself, and because Ravel’s music was still under copyright, the boost in sales generated a million dollars in royalties for his estate, making him the highest-selling classical composer of the twentieth century.
— © Patrick Summers
Ludovic Morlot’s élan, elegance, and intensity on stage have endeared him to audiences and orchestras worldwide, from the Berlin Philharmonic to the Boston Symphony. Music director of the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra since September 2021, he is concurrently conductor emeritus of the Seattle Symphony (where he was music director 2011–19) and has been associate artist of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra since 2019. He was artistic director and a founding member of the National Youth Orchestra of China 2017–21. He was chief conductor of La Monnaie from 2012–14, conducting new productions including La Clemenza di Tito, Jenufa, and Pelléas et Mélisande. In 2025–26 Morlot tours Germany with the Barcelona Symphony. They continue to expand their recordings on the orchestra’s own label, from their acclaimed Ravel cycle to discs championing the best of the Catalan composers. He returns to the BBC Philharmonic for three projects including Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, John Adams’s Harmonielehre, and Cassandra Miller’s Viola Concerto. He returns to the Seattle Opera for their new production of Carmen after great successes with Rheingold, Die Walküre, and Samson et Dalila in the past three years. Morlot has a particularly strong connection with Boston. He received the Seiji Ozawa Fellowship at Tanglewood and was subsequently appointed assistant conductor for the Boston Symphony. Ludovic is affiliate professor at the University of Washington School of Music and a visiting artist at the Colburn School. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Academy of Music in 2014.
lisa Weilerstein is one of the foremost cellists of our time. Known for her consummate artistry, emotional investment, and rare interpretive depth, she was recognized with a MacArthur Fellowship in 2011. Today her career extends to prestigious international venues for solo recitals, chamber concerts, and concerto collaborations. With her multi-season solo cello project, FRAGMENTS, Weilerstein aims to reimagine the concert experience. Comprising six programs, each an hour long, the series weaves together the thirty-six movements of Bach’s solo cello suites with twenty-seven new commissions in a multisensory production by Elkhanah Pulitzer. Weilerstein regularly appears with the world’s major orchestras alongside preeminent conductors. She is a leading exponent of the cello repertoire’s greatest classics and an ardent proponent of contemporary music who has premiered important new concertos by Pascal Dusapin, Matthias Pintscher, and Joan Tower. 2024–25 highlights included season-opening concerts with the San Diego and Kansas City symphonies; returns to the Berlin Philharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus, and Royal Concertgebouw orchestras; and duo recitals with Inon Barnatan at Stanford University and in Boston’s Celebrity Series. As an authority on Bach’s music for unaccompanied cello, Weilerstein released a best-selling recording of his solo suites for Pentatone in 2020, streaming them in her innovative #36DaysOfBach project. Her discography also includes chart-topping albums and a winner of BBC Music’s Recording of the Year award. Diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at nine years old, Weilerstein is an advocate for the T1D community.
