Gaspard

Described by Ravel himself as “romantic poems of transcendental virtuosity,” the three pieces of Gaspard de la nuit are piano nocturnes as weird in their way as the    night-time visions in the Aloysius    Bertrand prose poems that inspired them. At the same time, they are keyboard studies    in the post-Liszt virtuoso tradition. In Ondine the “sad and tender” voice of the water nymph is sustained by an expressive melodic line in one hand while the water sounds suggested by shimmering chords and rippling arpeggios run on in the other. Ravel was almost as fascinated by bells as he was by water. He was obsessed too by harmonic pedal points – like the B flat tolling quietly but persistently throughout Le Gibet which so vividly reflects Bertrand’s macabre scene of a corpse hanging from a gibbet and turned red by the setting sun. In creating a musical equivalent to Bertrand’s Scarbo Ravel transcended everything he had achieved before in terms of keyboard virtuosity. It requires the agility, the versatility, the rhythmic vitality, the inexhaustible energy deployed by the hallucinatory midnight figure of Scarbo himself in tormenting his unfortunate victim.