Sarabande

Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

Sarabande

arranged by Maurice Ravel

Ravel’s favourite composing activity was orchestration, an art in which he excelled like few of his contemporaries. Several of the most familiar of his orchestral scores - like Pavane pour une Infante défunte and Le Tombeau de Couperin - are actually arrangements of music written in the first place for piano, while his brilliant version of Pictures at an Exhibition is far more often performed than Mussorgsky’s piano original. The Pictures score and the rather less well known arrangements of two of Debussy’s piano pieces, Danse and Sarabande, were all written in 1922 - a year in which, since he found little inspiration for initiating anything of his own, Ravel was particularly receptive to the idea of working on the music of others.

The commission for the Debussy pieces came from Jean Jobert, who had just taken over the publishing house of Fromont and, in consequence, the rights to some of Debussy’s early piano pieces. Sarabande, a reworking of a piece of the same name written in 1894 and first published in the suite Pour le piano in 1901, is a turn of the twentieth-century homage to the French baroque. Ravel makes no more effort in his orchestration than Debussy in his harmonies to reflect the Louis XV associations of the Sarabande - his use of the tam tam not far into the piece, subtle though it is, would be a particularly alien sound in that context - but while enriching Debussy’s piano colouring he retains the chastity of its demeanour and, of course, the dignity of its step.