Two pieces from Miroirs (1904-5)

Oiseaux tristes

Alborada del gracioso

Although Debussy and Ravel were not the best of friends, each knew what the other was doing by way of Ricardo Viñes, the favoured pianist of both composers. It was Viñes who told Ravel that Debussy was thinking about writing music so free in form that it would seem to be “torn straight out of a sketch book.” Working on his Miroirs at the time, Ravel welcomed the idea as a revelation. Oiseaux tristes does indeed seem so spontaneous that it might have been improvised. Based on the song of a blackbird noted down on a walk in the woods at Fontainebleau, it evokes “birds lost in the torpor of a very dark forest at the hottest time of summer.”

Alborada del gracioso, the fourth of the five movements of Miroirs, derives from a concept Ravel had explored in 1893 in his Sérénade grotesque, which is also vigorous Spanish dance music articulated in guitar-like keyboard figuration and offset by expressive if caricatured vocal melody. It is presented here as a stylish seguidilla framing a vividly characterised middle section where the gracioso (the pathetic jester of classical Spanish comedy) sings his lugubrious serenade.so free in form that it would seem to be “torn straight out of a sketch book.” Ravel welcomed the idea as a revelation. Oiseaux tristes does indeed seem so spontaneous that it might have been improvised. Based on the song of a blackbird noted down on a walk in the woods at Fontainebleau, it evokes (in the composer’s own words) “birds lost in the torpor of a very dark forest at the hottest time of summer.”

There is another Ondine in Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, where the nymph so gracefully disports herself in the water imagery he had invented in Jeux d’eau in 1901. Six years before that in his Habanera - after Chabrier’s example, it is true, but before the earliest of Debussy’s - Ravel had revealed the impressionist potential of the Spanish musical idiom, which he continued to exploit in Alborada del gracioso, the fourth of the five movements of Miroirs, in 1905. This “Fool’s Aubade”derives from a concept he had explored in 1893 in his Sérénade grotesque, which is also vigorous Spanish dance music articulated in guitar-like keyboard figuration and offset by expressive if caricatured vocal melody. It is presented here as a stylish seguidilla framing a vividly characterised middle section where the gracioso (the pathetic jester of classical Spanish comedy) sings his lugubrious serenade.