Ravel, Maurice / orch. Jörg Birhance

Ravel, Maurice / orch. Jörg Birhance – «Fugue» & «Toccata» from «Le Tombeau de Couperin» (first print)

(b. Ciboure bei Saint-Jean-de-Luz, 7 March 1875 – d. Paris, 28 December 1937)

(1914-17)

Orchestrée par Jörg Birhance
(* 1966)

Maurice Ravel composed Le Tombeau de Couperin during the First World War, between 1914 and 1917. The cycle, originally written for piano, with the movements Prélude, Fugue, Forlane, Rigaudon, Menuet and Toccata, is firstly a homage to the elegance, clarity, and imagination of its namesake, François Couperin, and moreover a work celebrating the humanity of friendship: each movement of the suite is dedicated to a friend of Ravel’s who fell during the war.

Ravel himself had served as a driver at the front and was deeply affected by the war years as well as by the death of his mother in 1917. Nevertheless, he deliberately chose a lucid musical language – for, as he later remarked, “the dead are sad enough.”

In 1919, he orchestrated four of the six movements – Prélude, Forlane, Menuet and Rigaudon – into a concert suite, which belongs among the finest, and, owing to the complexity of the Forlane, also the most peculiar, works in the orchestral repertoire for this instrumentation.

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