Our next concerts (click below for details) will feature Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet in F major.

A few key facts about Maurice Ravel:

He is widely considered one of history’s greatest orchestrators, most famous for his work on Boléro and his arrangement of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition

Along with Claude Debussy, he is a primary figure of Impressionism, though he preferred the term Symbolism and maintained more rigid formal structures than Debussy (note: Debussy did not like to be qualified as “Impressionist” either, but the label is indeed helpful to most of us).

Known as a “Swiss Watchmaker” (a nickname from Stravinsky), his scores are incredibly precise and technically demanding. Maurice Ravel’s father was a Swiss engineer.

His Basque heritage deeply influenced his music, seen in works like Rapsodie espagnole, the opera L’heure espagnole, or Boléro. Ravel’s mother was Basque.

He was fascinated by American jazz after meeting George Gershwin, incorporating blue notes and syncopation into his Piano Concerto in G Major.

Despite his small stature, he served as a truck driver at the Verdun front* during World War I, an experience that deeply affected his compositions: only a-cappella vocal music during the war, then 18th century baroque in “Le Tombeau de Couperin”, and a dark tone in “La Valse”. The choice of a lean, “stripped to the bone” violin-cello sonata for the 1920 homage to Claude Debussy was also a turning point for Ravel.

(*In the battle of Verdun, over 25,000 soldiers died in a few days)

He scandalized his fellow French musicians at least twice. First, he refused to join a call to ban the performance of German works during WWI. Then he rejected France’s highest order of merit in 1920, not agreeing that art should be judged by the government.

His final years were marked by a brain condition (possibly Pick’s disease) that left his mind intact but took away his ability to write or perform music.

This 2023 movie about Maurice Ravel is worth watching. Below is the 2′ preview: