About this Piece

For Ravel, craftsmanship did not imply sameness: “I have never limited myself to a ‘Ravel’ style,” he once quipped. His music abounds with idiosyncratic effects and divergent impulses, its overflowing inventiveness shaped by a natural expressive economy and its meticulously crafted phrases awash in sensuous instrumental color. He was open to the myriad sounds of the early-20th-century environment; as he expressed to an American journalist, “The world is changing and contradicting itself as never before. I am happy to be living through all this and to have the good fortune of being a composer.” This ability to retain a sense of balance while surrounded by the artistic and social chaos of early Modernism allowed Ravel to find stimulation in an eclectic mix of sources without boxing himself into any particular “ism.” As a result, his music retains a freshness that sounds more forward-looking the older it gets.

In Le tombeau de Couperin, originally composed for piano in 1917, Ravel expressed his modern sensibility in the accents of the 1700s. He described it as an homage “directed less in fact to Couperin himself than to French music of the 18th century.” Disregarding the philosopher (and would-be composer) Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1753 pronouncement that “there is neither rhythm nor melody in French music,” Ravel fused rhythmic and melodic forms and cadences of Couperin’s time with those of his own. The work conveys a sense of the present as a perennially open dialogue with the past.

Tonight’s soloist, Thomas Ospital, provides his own transcription of the piece, following the structure of the four-movement orchestral suite rather than the six-movement original for piano. The Prélude delicately ripples with Baroque ornamentation cast through a modernist lens. Ravel’s wide-ranging melody and subtle rhythmic inflections impart a lithe grace to the Italian Forlane. The graceful Menuet sparkles, while the bustling Rigaudon captures the peculiar vivacity of French society in any century.

—Susan Key