Ravel : Gaspard de la Nuit (Beatrice Rana)

Comments from the score (RayBird) :

Published in 1909 Gaspard de la Nuit is
considered to be the most beautiful, masterly and challenging of all Ravel’s œuvre for piano.
The poet Aloysius Bertrand(1807— 1841), alchemist of irony and speech, whose only
collection, Gaspard de la Nuit had just been reedited in 1908 by the Mercure de
France, seduced Ravel, who immediately and dramatically changed his pianistic style: from the infantile Mother Goose
(1908) to the fantastic, from
extreme simplicity to extreme virtuosity, and to
transpose as if for a wager the spell of prose poetry into the wizardry of the keyboard.
Ravel confided that he wished to compose a work of transcendental virtuosity even more difficult than Balakirev’s Islamey.
The poems themselves are expressed with
strong creative imagination, and explore fantasies of medieval Europe — each
prefaced by a short literary
quotation.
The name "Gaspard" is derived from “Kaspur” or indeed “Casper”, the
biblical treasurer of the three wise men.
Of the work, Ravel himself
said: "Gaspard has been a devil in coming, but that is only logical since it was he who is the author of the poems.
My ambition is to say with notes what a poet expresses with words.”



This performance was recorded live during the 2013 edition of the Van Cliburn piano competition. Beatrice Rana gives us a dark and profound listening experience. An interpretation that I consider to be very musical in first place

0:00 I. Ondine
6:36 II. Le gibet
12:53 III. Scarbo