L’Eventail de Jeanne: Fanfare

Jeanne Dubost was a celebrated Parisian hostess, director of a children’s ballet school and a good friend to many of the most prominent musicians of the day. It was in tribute to her that ten composers - Ravel, Ferroud, Ibert, Roland-Manuel, Delannoy, Roussel, Milhaud, Poulenc, Auric and Schmitt - got together to write a little ballet was to be performed by her pupils in her home in 1927. L’Éventail de Jeanne (Jeanne’s Fan) was first seen in public at the Paris Opéra two years later, with costumes designed by Marie Laurencin and with the nine-year-old Tamara Toumanova making her debut as a ballet dancer. Ravel’s tiny Fanfare, which was designed both to open and close the work, is a good indication of the not very serious, even parodistic nature of the ten short pieces that make up the score. Marked “Wagneramente,” it proceeds by way of a dramatic drum roll and a miscellany of toy-trumpet and horn calls to a massively conclusive stroke of the tam tam.