Piano Concerto in G Major

Maurice Ravel was the son of a distinguished engineer and inventor. In the 1870s, when his father was working on railroad construction projects in Spain, Maurice was born on the French side of the nearby border. The family returned to Paris a few months later, and there, at the age of seven, Maurice Ravel began his musical studies; at eighteen, he began to write music, at twenty, he was a published composer.

In the late 1920s, when the Boston Symphony Orchestra was approaching composers to whom it offered commissions for compositions to be performed during the 1930-1931 anniversary celebration. Stravinsky, Hindemith, Respighi were among those who accepted and wrote new works for the orchestra, but Ravel, after airing the possibility of writing a piano concerto, sent nothing because he had several other projects in mind at the time. In addition to the concerto, he was thinking of an opera on the subject of Joan of Arc that was never to be written. Ravel worked off and on for more than two years on the concerto, which was to be his last orchestral composition. Shut off from the rest of the world at his country home, he spent ten to twelve hours a day at his desk, especially during the period in 1931 when he was simultaneously writing both the Concerto in G and Piano Concerto for the Left Hand.

The G Major Concerto was barely finished in time for its premiere in Paris on January 14, 1932. The soloist was Marguerite Long, to whom the work is dedicated; the composer conducted. Later, Ravel told a newspaper interviewer that this work was a “concerto in the strict sense, written in the spirit of Mozart and Saint Saens.” “I believe,” he said, “that a concerto can be both gay and brilliant without necessarily being profound or aiming at dramatic effects . . .. In the beginning, I thought of calling my work a ‘divertissement,’ but afterwards considered this unnecessary, since the noun ‘Concerto’ adequately describes the kind of music it contains.”

The first movement, Allegramente, with its whip crack opening, is a work of hard and brilliant wit, forceful and energetic. The slow movement, Adagio assai, contemplative and rhythmically complex with hints of the blues, somehow also arouses recollections of every kind of concerto slow movement from Bach and Mozart to Gershwin. The finale, Presto, is brief and brilliant. It contains a flash of jazz, fanfares, and piano flourishes.