Miroirs

Very few everyday items are as laden with mysticism as mirrors. They are symbols not only of physical, but of spiritual reflection – showing the truth and nothing but the truth, albeit in a reverted manner. A mirror’s image unites two seemingly irreconcilable aspects: the gossamer winged ephemerality of reflecting everything and everyone that happens to pass by, however fleetingly; but also an unwavering steadfastness in the accuracy of its depictions. 

Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) composed his eponymous Miroirs in 1905 as a tribute to his friends, members of an artistic circle casually referred to as Les Apaches (approximately: “hooligans”). Rather than composing musical portraits, the contrarian composer decided to capture the more ethereal aspects of his friends’ personalities. Noctuelles (“moths”), dedicated to poet Léon-Paul Fargue, continually wavers between B flat minor and G flat major and features a recapitulation a fifth below its opening theme, like a moth tiring from its dance with a flickering light. The second piece in the cycle, Oiseaux Tristes (“sad birds”) is modeled on pianist Ricardo Viñes, who would later premiere Miroirs in its entirety. Une barque sur l’océan (“a boat on the ocean”) was supposed to reflect Paul Sordes, at whose studio home the Apaches would meet every Saturday. Alborada del gracioso (Spanish for “the jester’s morning love song”) is the most technically challenging work of the set, posing great pianistic challenges not only with regards to technique, but also in uniting highly diverse, border-crossing musical influences such as French impressionism and Spanish folk music. (Its dedicatee, Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi, was a French-born, multilingual music critic of Greek descent, who later became an English citizen and harboured a lifelong interest in Russian music.) The final piece, La vallée des cloches (“the valley of bells”), was composed for Maurice Delage, one of Ravel’s favorite and most beloved students who had begun his career as a humble fishmonger. 

El Amor y Muerte: Ballada (Love and Death: Ballad) is the fifth movement of Spanish composer-pianist Enrique Granados’s (1867–1916) Goyescas, a six-movement work for piano written between 1900 and 1914. Firmly anchored in late Romanticism, Granados based his Goyescas on drawings by fellow countryman Francisco de Goya, who had lived and died a good century before. Based on Goya’s Capricho No. 10, the entirety of El Amor y Muerte aims to replicate the emotion within Goya’s work. El Amor y Muerte falls in a section where the tone and plotline of Goya’s Caprichos drastically change, from a once hopeful love story of servant-class lovers labeled “Majo” and “Maja,” to one dampened by lament and grief. In this particular movement, Granados provides insight into the young girl’s lament, brought on by the death of her lover. When cross-referencing this piece with the original drawing, Majo is seen dead in Maja’s arms with a sword laying at their feet, a critical moment in the narrative expressed through music in this tender and evocative composition.

La Valse (1920) was composed by Ravel at the behest of Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who, perhaps naively, commissioned and envisioned a light-footed Viennese waltz for the Russian ballet ensemble he had founded. It is questionable what Ravel thought of the order: Instead of complying with his patron’s vision, he based the resulting work on sketches going back fourteen years. When the work was premiered in the presence of Diaghilev, Stravinsky and Poulenc, among others, the commissioner rejected it, calling it “not a ballet, but a portrait of a ballet”. It wasn’t used in practice until eight years later in a choreography for Ida Rubinstein, and remains a staple in avantgardistic dance to this day. 

Quejas, o la Maja y el Ruiseñor (“Lamentations, or the young girl and the nightingale”) marks the technical and musical climax of Goyescas (1911), often considered the most crowning achievement by Spanish composer-pianist Enrique Granados (1867–1916). Firmly anchored in late Romanticism, Granados based his Goyescas on drawings by fellow countryman Francisco de Goya, who had lived and died a good century before. Quejas, on its surface, portrays a young, servant-class girl tortured by jealousy, who decides to pour her heart out to her trusty friend – a nightingale, which answers cheerfully. Beyond the veil of this purely programmatic appeal, however, Quejas is not only a pinnacle in terms of compositional and pianistic virtuosity, requiring both absolute technical command as well as profound sensitivity; it’s perhaps one of the most accurate musical depictions of having loved and lost in the Western canon. 

Rhapsody in Blue (1924) is easily the most recognizable composition by American pianist and conductor George Gershwin (1898–1937). Originally scored for two pianos, it was orchestrated multiple times by various arrangers, and later distilled into a solo piano work in the early 1940’s. The work successfully fuses jazz, blues and symphonic influences, and its themes and melodies are known around the world. The term “rhapsody” originally meant “recited poem” and nowadays denotes a musical piece without a clear form or categorization. Gershwin later claimed to have “heard” the piece in the rattle and noise of a train ride, saying “I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness.” 

Miroirs is indeed a well-considered, well-chosen title for this album. Ravel, Granados, and Gershwin may have been contemporaries in the broadest sense, but their unique voices couldn’t be more heterogeneous. And yet, the selection of works presented here is unified by a common aspect: Each of the piano pieces presented acts as little, thoughtfully-crafted vignette, highly programmatic and illustrative – one could say: reflective, in both meanings of the word. 

— HyeJin Kim