RAVEL VIOLIN SONATA NO.2, SECOND MOVEMENT ‘BLUES’

Violinist Curtis Stewart looks at how to get the most from the different styles Ravel used, and how questions that arise from their juxtaposition are arguably more important than answers

TITILAYO AYANGADE

From Ravel Violin Sonata in G major. Urtext edition with marked and unmarked string parts. Ed. Ulrich Krämer. Pf. fingering Pascal Rogé. Vln fingering and bowing Christian Tetzlaff. Order no. HN 1271. ISMN 979-0-2018-1271-7 €23.00. Printed with permission of G. Henle Verlag, München © 2016

One of the classes I teach at Juilliard is on performance practice of the blues and I feel this piece is a perfect place for classical string players to start. Writing in 1927 against a backdrop of industrialisation, Ravel clearly immersed himself in the American jazz that found its way to Paris because he emulates it so well, while framing it within his own language. Elements of his style, such as the impressionistic polytonality and orchestral voicing, ornament the structure in such a perfect way that it can be heard as a commentary on the blues from the perspective of early 20th-century French art music.

Two worlds

A key question is how ‘bluesy’ to make the second movement of the Violin Sonata no.2. You can really inhabit that style, bending and breaking the rhythm and adding growl-type sounds which mimic extreme vocal techniques. But those things are atypical in classical performance, especially on the violin, so it’s about understanding where they are most important in the composer’s framework, and bringing those moments into relief by playing other sections in a style more typical of Ravel.

If the first movement takes us into a world of the past, with its Baroque rhythms and Renaissance-flavour polytonality, then the beginning of the second movement immediately interrupts that, bringing us into the modern world with strummed chords imitating a guitar. The pianissimo here is actually very marked and rhythmically intense even though it might be soft in terms of decibels. It’s as if we are approaching a blues guitarist from a distance. In my mind, I put a staccato dot on each chord and mute the natural resonance of pizzicato chords on the violin by lifting the first finger of the left hand slightly after each strum to make a drier, more driven sound.

THE SOLOIST

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NAME

CURTIS STEWART

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NATIONALITY

AMERICAN

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STUDIED WITH

MARK STEINBERG, LYNN BLAKESLEE, DIANE MONROE

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RECORDS FOR

NEW AMSTERDAM, BRIGHT SHINY THINGS AND OTHERS

‘It’s somewhere between a fun, flirtatious dance rhythm and something quite military’

Alongside his recording of Julia Perry’s Violin Concerto, Curtis Stewart will be performing the Ravel at Alice Tully Hall on 16 March. Other performances in March 2024 include new commissions for the Chicago Symphony, Oregon Symphony and Orchestra MusicNOW.

Each forte in this section emphasises the typical blues chord changes from I to IV, I to V and so on, and should sound like a ‘shuffle’, slightly pushing the metrical stability rather than being played as big, round accents. Around bar 7 you want the pizzicato to sound especially assertive so that the mystery of the piano’s entry in A flat major against the simple G major strums is heightened. In choosing an A flat and E flat for the piano’s first bar and a half, which can absolutely be heard as blues notes in G major, Ravel creates an ambiguity – are the two instruments inhabiting different worlds or not? To my mind it’s important that both players are clear stylistically. If the violin sounds like a blues guitar and the piano sounds wonderfully soft and impressionistic, then the intended question mark of the piece comes through here more strongly.

The ambiguities continue throughout this movement, starting three bars before figure 1 where the piano line suggests phrasing to the down-beat but the violin’s forte seems to demand the emphasis comes on the fourth beat. You can justify either, but what is often more interesting is to ask the questions.

Role models for style

With the long cantabile section for the violin from figure 1, it is our prerogative to model our sound on the best blues singers we can find. I would recommend borrowing from Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Nancy Wilson whose voices were so naturally clean that you can hear exactly how long a slide is, when the vibrato might start (and how wide it is) and how rich or breathy the tone is. The marking here to play nostalgically, on the A string, suggests to me that more of a breathiness is called for and to achieve that I might press down only lightly with the left hand. It also helps if the hand is constantly in motion, squid-like, so that the slides happen organically and don’t take too long.

The phrase from figure 1 introduces this first melodic idea but peppers it with questions and side notes, and it’s only with the restatement from figure 2 that we have more of a settled sense of where we are. A slide in places like the fourth bar of figure 2 is a great way to accentuate this new confidence.

Having been led to think we are in E flat major, the brief key change at figure 3 is startling enough to nudge the music into a subtly different style. I can’t help but hear the quavers (e) as swung notes here although one could choose Ravel’s more impressionistic voice instead of the blues style and make a virtue of playing them straight. Either way, the written-in slides need to be managed and not extreme. I tend to favour a cross between a Kreisler shift and a Russian shift and, in bar 46, more of a rough glissando than three distinct notes. The main thing is that the slides emphasise the note of arrival, whether in a rhythmic or an impressionistic way.

At figure 4 the piano dynamic has to be full of latent energy. We have had a moment of lightness with the dotted crotchet–quaver ( j e) material in the previous section and now the first theme reasserts itself, making a striking impression even with the half-phrases. And if the piano statement was ready to burst, then the mezzoforte four bars later is positively boiling over.

Forebodings

The pizzicato chords at figure 5 are a nod to the piano’s gentle, alternating bass-line in figure 3 and as such, I think they can be quite resonant. We have heard a lot of piano by this stage so a dry sound would not come across as well as at the beginning, in addition to which, we are playing a slightly different role here. The main interest is between the straight four-time accompaniment and the hemiolas played first in the piano by the right hand and then shared in canon with the violin. It’s somewhere between a fun, flirtatious dance rhythm and something quite military: a pre-echo of the pizzicato snare-drum effect from figure 7 onwards in the violin part. So, the pizzicato theme from bar 72 can have a really direct sound, which fits naturally with the amount of force needed to make the plucked slide in bar 75, and the phrase drives right to the C natural in the bar before figure 6.

With the theme at figure 6 Ravel seems most fully himself – Romantic and expressive – with not a little hint of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue thrown in. It pays to embrace the syncopation in places like bars 83 and 88. And consider adding texture to the triplets ( ), not only with left-hand slides but also a little extra bow pressure to get that gravelly vocal quality mentioned at the start. The music becomes more and more impassioned as the triplets repeat and then another startling moment at figure 7 offsets the beauty and points towards something altogether different and unyielding, which has been driving the movement.

Conflict

The military idea really comes to the fore from this point onwards and the strummed snare drum effect, while being very held, rhythmically, should sound wild and out of control. As the piano no longer has steady crotchets (q) here but quite involved melodic writing, the violinist has to take up as much space as possible as they adopt this rhythmic role. It is as if this drive propels the violin to sing the first theme way up high at figure 9, reversing roles again with the piano and pulling against its foursquare rhythmic insistence with the sweet, yearning blues theme. I imagine someone from a simple country life drafted into the military, who is calling back for what they had.

Evaporation

Although the melody appears to resolve at figure 10, the music drives onwards, changing and modulating right up until the flourish at figure 12. Along with the final flourish in bar 144, this is such a Ravelian chord that it leaves us wondering whether the world of the blues, and even the machine-like world underneath, were in fact a dream and we have actually been in Ravel’s world all along. It could be heard as a commentary on the direction of the 20th century, or simply enjoyed as a masterful combination of different musical worlds.

INTERVIEW BY HELENA RUINARD

Blues