Escales (Ports of Call)

Palermo – Rome: Calme – Assez animé – Calme

Tunis - Nefta: Modéré, très rythmé

Valencia: Animé – Modéré – Animé

The major attractions of the Prix de Rome – a prize awarded annually to the young French artists and composers who came top in their respective categories after a hotly contested competition – were the money, the prestige and the guaranteed beginning of a professional career. Rather less attractive, at least to some of them, was the requirement that the winners should spend two years working at the Académie de France in the Villa Medici in Rome. The composers, who were less likely than the artists to benefit from exposure to the Italian heritage, tended on the whole to dislike the idea. Debussy, who won the Prix de Rome in 1884, positively hated it. Jacques Ibert, however, who won the prize 25 years later, loved it – so much in fact that when he was offered the directorship of the Villa Medici in 1937 he accepted it and retained the post until 1960. The Prix de Rome was discontinued, incidentally, after the student riots in Paris in 1968.

Escales (Ports of Call), which was written partly in Rome and partly in Paris between 1920 and 1922, was a direct result of Ibert’s Prix de Rome experience. Before he left for the Villa Medici he got married and combined the journey to Rome with a leisurely honeymoon tour of the Mediterranean. Memories of that trip inspired the three movements of a work coloured not least by the impression made by encounters with Arab musical culture, and not only in Tunisia.

There is an unmistakably exotic quality in the languorous melody uttered by a seductive solo flute over whispered violin tremolandos in the opening section of the first movement, apparently recalling the magical atmosphere of an early morning in Sicily. As that melody is taken up by oboe, then by strings, then by the whole orchestra the light becomes ever brighter until, with a sudden acceleration of the tempo, the scene changes from Palermo to Rome. The occasion here is what seems to be some kind of street festival with a vigorous dance tune introduced by trumpet, presented in a variety of instrumental colours and finally driven to a frenzied fff climax. A diminuendo and a gradual reduction of the tempo prepare for a return to Palermo, the exotic identity of which is immediately re-affirmed by voluptuous strings. This time, however, the Sicilian material is combined with echoes of the Roman dance tune on woodwind.

The most original of the three movements is the second, set in the desert at Nefta in Tunisia. Excluding all brass and all other woodwind, it is an extended oboe solo accompanied by a recurring rhythmic pattern – the metre alternating between 3/4 and 4/4 on a bar-by-bar basis – sustained by timpani and strings, the latter mainly plucked or tapped with the wood of the bow. It is probably as near to an authentic Arab sound as anyone could get by means of standard orhestral instruments at the time.

If the third movement is the least original of the three, it is no less entertaining for that. Inspired by a visit to Valencia, it is a brilliant anthology of the instrumental colours and dance rhythms familiar from generations of French composers’ orchestral evocations of Spain from Chabrier’s España onwards. While Ibert cannot compete with Debussy or Ravel in terms of poetry, he surely yields to no one in over-the-top exuberance. Certainly, he spared no effort here in furnishing an exhilarating ending to a work welcomed at the time as one of immense promise.

Gerald Larner © 2010