Gershwin and Ravel - Music for Two Pianos

Music for Two Pianos

George GERSHWIN (1898-1937)

Rhapsody in Blue (1924) 

Cuban Overture (1932) 

Variations on I Got Rhythm (1934)

Maurice RAVEL (1875-1937)

Ma mère l’Oye (1908) 

Les Sites auriculaires (1895)

Boléro (1928) 

Maurice RAVEL, attributed to F Dante Pilade “Fermo” Marchetti (1876–1940) arranged by Anthony Goldstone

Fascination (Valse tzigane) (1904) 

Anthony Goldstone and Caroline Clemmow (two pianos and piano duet)

rec. 1997 (Variations on I Got Rhythm only) and 2007, St John the Baptist, Alkborough, North Lincolnshire. 

 

I welcome this disk wholeheartedly for its joyous and infectious exuberance. 

The Gershwin works jump out of the speakers at you and, only occasionally, do you regret the lack of orchestral or dance band accompaniment. This says a lot for the music which would appear to need the colourful orchestral part to cover Gershwin’s failings in handling of form. These performances made me rethink what I had always considered to be the stumbling blocks in these pieces. I certainly wouldn’t want to be without the orchestral versions but these chamber images are excellent expositions of the scores. 

The Ravel pieces are a different matter. 

Ma mère l’Oye (Mother Goose), or One in the Eye for Mother, as my dear Master at college always called it, is an original composition for piano duet. Written for the enjoyment of children – certainly not for children to play as it is far too difficult for the age group the work is aimed at – these five movements are a sheer delight. Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast and an enchanted garden are amongst the people and places inhabiting Ravel’s magical imagination. If you don’t know the work you have missed one of the great treats of musical literature. 

Les Sites auriculaires contain two of Ravel’s earliest works – an Habanera (which resurfaces ten years later as the third movement in the Rapsodie espagnole) and a tintinnabulation called Entre cloches. Playing for a little over five minutes this shows a side of Ravel which comes to fruition later in his career – Le Gibet, for instance, with its continual tolling bell, and the Spanish influence. 

Ravel wrote Fascination (Valse tzigane) in 1904 and sold it to Marchetti due to his impecunious circumstances. The following year the publisher Durrand would give him a contract for 12,000 francs per annum. Goldstone’s arrangement adds sly glances at both Ma mère and Boléro. 

Ravel told Arthur Honegger that he had “… written only one masterpiece – Boléro. Unfortunately there’s no music in it”. Of course he was wrong; there are many masterpieces and there is a lot of music in Boléro. However the work must have hung like the proverbial millstone round his neck. It’s easy to be superior and claim that it is of no intrinsic value but Boléro cannot be ignored. It is a fantastic piece of work, which holds the attention in spellbound fascination as it treads its weary way to the fabulous, and hair-raising, modulation to E major and equally rapid fall back into C. After this I would have welcomed these players launching into the two piano version of La Valse. 

Magnificent performances, excellent recording and fine notes, by Goldstone, make this a most desirable disk.

Bob Briggs