Intonation and Visual aesthetics in Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concert for the Left hand (Re Major)

Maurice Ravel is a French composer of the 20^th century. He is regarded as the follower of Impressionism style. Yet I believe that music itself is impressionistic and abstract phenomenon whereas Ravel’s works include other more elements, which are not typical for impressionism (plot, sharpness, distinct nature and positive or negative emotions).

High-grade performance of a musical composition requires broad imaginative talent, deep emotionality and undeniably taste, sense of abstraction and logic. If a composition has a certain meaning, performer should give artistic expressive power, all meaning varieties, nature, and mood to each fragment and present them as logical sequential parts of the whole unit. Of course, it is impossible to repeat the original idea created by the author; however, attempts should be made since doing so, on the one hand, will broaden musical taste and on the other hand, phenomenon of congeniality in art has proved that sometimes interpretation of a certain composition is no less valued than original work.

Here I would like to quote from part 2, visual analysis of the concert of my thesis: “Following this moment we meet the most beautiful part, which reminds me of drizzling. I think that the composer wisely applies natural phenomena throughout the composition. Apparent example of doing so is using thunder-like sounds in the conclusive part of the work. Harmoniously, daytime or given moment of the daytime is cloudy. Thus we can give the environment in the concert grayish hue, though the colors themselves are fresh and vivid as the air becomes clean and visibility - better while drizzling. Now let us get back to musical “raining” part. Here pianos play arpeggios and orchestra flutes softly respond them through chord staccatos. Ravel applies a brilliant way of his mastery: he portrays the nature of each raindrop, emphasizing power of some, in other words, raindrops fall with different level of strength. This makes the sensation pretty natural and concrete, rather than blended with other components of the whole impression as in impressionism”.

Finally, we can conclude that Ravel’s work being discussed entails distinct emotional, impressionistic elements as well as effects reinforced with naturalistic concrete sounds. This makes possible not only for musicians but also listeners to enhance musical impression depicted in the composition by visual images.

Dato Nadiradze