Nocturnes arranged for two pianos by Maurice Ravel

Nuages: modéré

Fêtes: animé et très rythmé - modéré mais toujours très rythmé

When Ravel agreed to collaborate with two other young musicians, Lucien Garban and Raoul Bardac, in a two-piano arrangement of Debussy’s Nocturnes in April 1901 he took on much the most difficult task of the three: “Sirènes is certainly the most perfectly beautiful,” he wrote, “but also the most dangerous, not least because it hasn’t been heard yet.”Nuages and Fêtes had been performed by the Lamoureux orchestra in December 1900 but, because of the difficulty of assembling the voices for Sirènes, the complete work would not be heard until October 1901.

In 1908, however, Ravel returned to the Nocturnes to tackle the two movements previously but unsuccessfully assigned to Garban and Bardac. This time the arrangements proved to be brilliantly effective. Obviously, Ravel could not accurately reproduce the Whistlerian study in grey represented by Debussy’s innovatory string-writing in Nuages but much of the poetry of that piece - inspired by clouds reflected on the smooth surface of the Seine on a moonless night - is still there in the piano harmonies floating so weightlessly on the 6/4 metre and in the firmly defined but mysteriously meaningful melodic figure projected along the surface at structurally strategic intervals. The hint of gamelan-style heterophony introduced in the pentatonic middle section is a particularly imaginative aspect of the present arrangement. Fêtes - inspired by a torchlight procession of the Garde Républicaine in the Bois de Boulogne - is no less sensational as arranged by Ravel than as scored by Debussy. In fact at the climactic point two thirds of the way through, where the opening jig-like tune is superimposed on the fanfares of the march, the two-piano version is actually clearer than the original.