Ma mère l’Oye

Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant: lent

Petit Poucet: très modéré

Laideronnette, Impératrice des Pagodes: mouvement de marche

Les entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête: mouvement de valse très modéré

Le Jardin    féerique: lent et grave

Ravel’s Ma mère l’Oye (Mother Goose) music is so familiar in the orchestral arrangement that it is easy to forget its humble origins as a children’s piano duet. Magical though the orchestration is, however, the keyboard scoring for four small hands of limited technique is even more resourceful. Indeed, it is not far short of miraculous. It started, with Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant, as an amusement for Mimie and Jean Godebski, the children of two of the composer’s best friends, when he was staying at their riverside retreat at Valvins in 1908. The other four movements were written two years later at the request of Ravel’s publisher, Jacques Durand, who had been enchanted by the Pavane when Mimie and Jean played it to him at Valvins one day. The idea was that the Godebski children, to whom the score is dedicated, should give the complete work its first public performance but, as Mimie recalled later, she was “terrified” by the prospect and the honour fell to the 14-year-old Geneviève Dorony and the 11-year-old Jeanne Leleu at the Salle Gaveau in Paris in April 1910.

To help him in “evoking the poetry of childhood,” as he put it, Ravel turned to the fairy-tales in Charles Perrault’s Contes de ma mère l’Oye and, for the third movement, the Comtesse d’Aulnoy’s Serpentin vert. It is not just story-telling, however. There is at least as much adult nostalgia as childish joy in these pieces and, under the cover of the fairy-tale characters, rather more of Ravel himself than his innate modesty usually allowed him to reveal. In spite of its chaste beauty, the Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant (Sleeping Beauty’s Pavane) is a lonely little inspiration, the spareness of the texture exposing its wistful melody to the small consolation of the modal harmonies that go with it. There is not much comfort either in the wandering chromatic lines and uncertain metre of Petit Poucet (Tom Thumb) where, after a brief allusion to the calls of the cuckoos and the high-pitched twittering of the songbirds attracted by Tom’s trail of crumbs, the gently reassuring main theme is resumed only to lose its way at the end.

Laideronnette, Impératrice des Pagodes (Little Ugly, Princess of the Pagodes) is contrastingly brilliant in colour, cheerfully extrovert in character and not a little parodistic in its pentatonic harmonies of Pagodes in Debussy’s Estampes. While the Empress takes her bath tiny creatures of crystal, porcelain, and precious stones entertain her with exotic tunes on walnut-shell theorbos and almond-shell viols. But even here, at the heart of the gamelan ceremonial in the middle of the piece, a private thought disconcertingly arises. Although Ravel was generous enough to acknowledge Satie as the “grand-papa” of Les Entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête (Conversations of Beauty and the Beast), and although it does begin as if in imitation of that composer’s Gymnopédies, its development is dramatic: Beauty’s slow-waltz poise, unsettled by the gruff pleas of the Beast rising in passion from the bass of the piano, is restored in a harmoniously amorous duet and finally transcended with the transformation of the Beast in the closing bars. The rhapsodic Jardin féerique (Fairy Garden) - which achieves an impressive climax by the simplest of means - could almost be a hymn to their happiness ever after.