I had the great good fortune recently of hearing an excellent live performance of Gaspard de la Nuit.
Wow. There are no words to describe the experience, but I’ll try.
The sound of the piece is stunning, the visual perception of the performance, no less so. The hands cross over one another, the fingers move so fast, they can be a blur to the human eye. And as hundreds, perhaps thousands, of notes roll by, you realize the pianist has memorized all of them. And that is only one part of it. The first hurdle is technical—being able to physically play the piece. The second is expressive—and that’s where the piece comes to life, and the pianist adds his own interpretation.
The first movement is about a water nymph that tries to tempt the listener to join her in her underwater realm. The second movement is a depiction of a hanged man on a scaffold in the desert. The third movement depicts the antics of a goblin, Scarbo, as he capers through the night.
In the third movement of Gaspard, Ravel had the intention of creating a piece of music more difficult that Balakirev’s Islamey, written in 1869. Balakirev drew his themes from folk music of the Caucasus and Crimea.
In watching these masterclasses, one thing that stands out is that the comments laser-focus in on specific measures, specific phrases. As I said earlier, when you learn music at this level, you don’t just learn the notes; that’s just the first step. Then, you consider the execution of phrases, their speed, the speed of separate sections of a given phrase, how connected, smooth, a phrase should be, how the volume evolves over a phrase. And that’s just one phrase.
Most of us may never be able to play Islamey, or its equivalent for the instrument we play. And some of us do not play instruments. But thinking about the music in this detail, listening for these nuances, will make the music richer, fuller, and more enjoyable.
We may not make it to Everest, but even the view from the foothills is worth the trek.
Catapulting into Classical 