Maurice Ravel, meticulous yet hot-headed, took after both of his parents, a Swiss engineer and a Basque peasant. Even though he was raised in Paris, Ravel was a perennial outsider who got himself expelled from the Paris Conservatory once as a piano student in 1895, and then again in 1900 after he returned as a composer and wouldn’t follow the rules for writing a proper fugue. His five consecutive rejections in the prestigious Rome Prize competition became something of a public scandal, and even his own teacher, Gabriel Fauré, piled on when he labeled Ravel’s final submission “a failure.” The submitted piece was none other than the String Quartet in F Major, which has long since taken its rightful place as a cornerstone of the quartet repertoire.

One musician who recognized the power of Ravel’s quartet was Claude Debussy, who wrote to his younger colleague, “In the name of the gods of music and in my own, do not touch a single note you have written in your Quartet.” Ravel’s quartet in fact shares many traits with Debussy’s own string quartet from a decade earlier, in the way they both develop thematic connections that link the separate movements.

In the famous second movement of Ravel’s quartet, the main melody is a close kin of the first movement’s opening theme. Here the material takes on a Spanish flair with strummed textures and moody scales related to Flamenco music, showing off Ravel’s deep connection to his mother’s roots. This fiery material gets refracted through Ravel’s fastidious sense of form, taking on the quality that led Stravinsky to offer a famously backhanded compliment, calling Ravel “the most perfect of Swiss watchmakers.”

The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra commissioned this ensemble arrangement by Michi Wiancko.

Aaron Grad ©2024