This concert has a certain je ne sais quoi

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) 
Le rouet d’Omphale (The Spinning Wheel of Omphale) (1871) 

It’s an anachronism. Omphale, Queen of ancient Lydia and eventually consort of Hercules, couldn’t possibly have had a spinning wheel. Such devices hadn’t been invented yet and wouldn’t come into use until the Middle Ages. Saint-Saëns knew that perfectly well. In his distinctly misogynistic program note he wrote that “the spinning wheel is only a pretext, chosen only from the point of view of the rhythm and the general appearance of the piece.” 

A bit of background is in order. Hercules might have been a legendary hero, but he was also a homicidal maniac with a nasty temper. Among his victims was Iphitus, a member of Jason’s Argonauts and, in some retellings, one of Hercules’ many lovers. Hercules killed Iphitus by tossing him off the walls of Tiryns. That did not sit well with either Iphitus’ family or the gods on Olympus, so by the command of either the Delphic Oracle or Apollo, Hercules was remanded as a slave to Omphale. In a strange cross-dressing punishment, he was obliged to wear women’s clothing while assisting Omphale in her thread-making. She dressed as male and even carried Hercules’ olive-wood club. Eventually Omphale freed and married him. It’s a weird little story. 

Le rouet d’Omphale is one of four Saint-Saëns symphonic poems drawn from mythology; the others are Danse macabre, Phaéton, and La jeunesse d’Hercule. Saint-Saëns seems to have been drawn to the story mostly for its pictorial elements, but considering that he dedicated it to the iron-willed composer Augusta Holmès, perhaps he also intended it as a commentary about female power over surly male creeps.  

Le rouet d’Omphale is expertly constructed and blessed with a masterful orchestration. Laid out in three sections, it portrays the clickety-clack of Omphale’s spinning wheel and her busy fingers running the thread, followed by a considerable darkening of tone as a sullen Hercules grunts and groans his way through his humiliation. In the third section, Omphale subjects him to a bit of gentle mockery, leading to a delicate ending as the wheel slows, then stops. 

Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) 
Piano Concerto in G (1929–31) 

In January 1928, shortly after having arrived in New York for a four-month tour, Ravel spoke to critic Olin Downes about his fascination with American jazz: “I think you know that I admire enormously and hold in high esteem – doubtless more still than most American composers – your jazz. But … my musical mode remains obviously French, even to the last informed listener.” 

No empty words there. Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G represents the quintessence of an “obviously French” idiom lightly seasoned with a soupçon of jazz elements. It can be thought of as the mirror of Gershwin’s An American in Paris – A Frenchman in New York, perhaps. Its story begins with that 1928 American tour, for which Ravel had originally intended to write a concerto for himself to play. As things turned out, he hadn’t even begun composing the work until early 1929, well after the tour had finished. It was delayed still further when Ravel interrupted work in favor of a different piano concerto for the piano left hand only, on a commission from pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm in World War I. Thus the Concerto in G wasn’t completed and ready for publication until late 1931. 

After all that, and after any number of hours slaving away on piano etudes in order to get his chops up to the concerto’s considerable demands, he realized that he was simply not up to the task of playing it reliably and handed the task over to his long-time colleague and friend Marguerite Long, who gave the premiere in January 1932. Recording trivia buffs take note: the 1932 recording, once thought to feature Ravel on the piano, is actually played by Long. 

The Concerto in G mixes lighthearted frivolity with exquisite sensibility. The first movement opens with the crack of a whip and keeps up a heady pace throughout, despite forays into blues-inflected passages. It sustains a rare balance between piano and orchestra – so much so, in fact, that it is as much a chamber ensemble as a concerto. (What other piano concerto includes an extended solo for the harp?) It is in the slow movement, an extended slow waltz for piano with delicate orchestral coloring, that the true heart of the concerto is to be found. Its spun-out lyrical line might sound natural and even spontaneous, but in fact it caused Ravel no end of trouble; he reported having eked it out a measure or two at a time, painfully, and that it came close to bringing him to despair. However, pain is temporary and music is forever. The exquisite Adagio was eventually completed and remains for all time as one of Ravel’s most noble and perfectly polished achievements. After such a journey, nothing much left remains to be said, and Ravel was wise enough not to try. The oh-so-brief finale is nothing less than an irresistible romp, funny, brilliant, and insouciant. Ravel originally planned to end the concerto with a series of soft trills, but fortunately he changed his mind. A solid thwack on the bass drum brings the concerto to a downright Hollywood-ish close, big and sassy. 

Maurice Ravel 
Daphnis et Chloé (1909–1912) 

We can only look back at Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes in wonder that it was even possible, much less that it actually existed. For a brief period before the First World War, Diaghilev brought together some of the brightest lights in European arts – Picasso, Nijinsky, Bakst, Fokine, Karsavina, Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel, de Falla – in a company that changed both ballet and music forever. The productions themselves were flabbergasting in their opulence and cost-no-object attitude towards their orchestral forces. Anyone approaching a ballet producer nowadays with a new piece requiring an orchestra the size of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring would be shown the door immediately; it would be too big of a risk for even the wealthiest of companies to take on an untried work. But for a while there, those 100-piece-plus orchestras were the norm rather than the exception for Diaghilev’s ballets, as were the innovative plots that swept away the fairy tales of the past. 

Maurice Ravel’s 1912 Daphnis et Chloé just might be the most astonishing of them all. Not only does it call for an utterly enormous orchestra but it also employs extra instruments both onstage and off, including – and this really boggles the mind – a wordless chorus. It’s not only impressive how they were able to fit all of that into the Théâtre du Châtelet and still have room for the dancers, but also how Diaghilev managed to pay for it all. (He was always in dire financial straits. How surprising.) 

The characters of Daphnis and Chloé, boy and girl respectively, first glided into literature in a second century novel by the Hellenistic writer Longus. It’s set in the fantasy world of the pastoral, a bucolic never-never-land that would become a fixture of 18th century arts and letters. The two are children who are abandoned at birth and raised by foster parents. The kids grow up together, herding their flocks, and they begin to fall in love. In their utter innocence they have no concept of what that means. 

They are exquisitely beautiful young people – it’s anybody’s guess which one is the prettiest – and they spend most of the story fending off, or escaping from, the amorous/carnal attentions of various unsavory types, rather like a sylvan Perils of Pauline. Of course both retain their respective virtue, even if the god Pan has to step in to protect Chloé and Daphnis barely escapes being molested by a slobbering horndog named Gnathon. The novel ends with their wedding night, and according to Longus “for all the sleep they got they might as well have been owls.” 

The ballet strips out the steamy parts but makes up for it with sonic eroticism. It is structured in three acts, of which the first introduces us to the setting and to our young couple; it ends with Chloé in peril and Daphnis in desperation as night falls. Act two is a pirate show in which Chloé is being held in captivity, but fortunately the god Pan appears and scatters the dastardly lot.  

Act three opens with the most splendid sunrise in all music, followed by an extended courtship ritual between Daphnis and Chloé. As they embrace at long last, the entire company closes it all off with a propulsive bacchanale. Its unabashed hedonism was quite a stretch for the patrician and reserved Ravel. “I did my work slowly, drop by drop,” he said. “I have torn all of it out of me by pieces.” 

It’s Ravel’s orchestral masterpiece. Even Igor Stravinsky, a man not given to idle compliments, was blown away by Daphnis et Chloé. “One of the most beautiful products of all French music,” he said.