The piano music of Maurice Ravel is among the most thrilling, the most
colorful, and, for pianists, the most challenging of the repertoire.
This book is about how performers and listeners can discover it and
relate to it - how it sounds and feels under the fingers and within the
receptive imagination. But to write about those experiences, to explore
the background, influences, and impulses behind Ravel's music, is to be
engaged in a form of biography. Discovering the delicate melancholy of
the Pavane and the Sonatine, the astounding virtuosity of Gaspard de la
nuit, and the exotic tone painting of Miroirs (Reflections) leads to the
question "Who was the extraordinary person who created this?" Here are
indispensable insights into the literary origins of Gaspard de la nuit,
the derivation of the water imagery in Jeux d'eau and the sensuous
delights of Miroirs. The chapter on Valses nobles et sentimentales
illuminates Ravel's meticulously controlled sense of irony. Le tombeau
de Couperin is related to the impact of the First World War on his
psyche and to the refuge he sought in the civilizing values of the age
of Watteau and Couperin. Intimate and perceptive, Reflections is
inescapably about the life of Maurice Ravel - reflections, by way of the
piano music, on an exceptionally private but immensely attractive man.
