Gaspard de la nuit, pour orchestre. Orchestration de Marius Constant by Maurice RavelReview by: Mark DeVotoNotes, Second Series, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Dec., 1992), pp. 814-815Published by: Music Library AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/897976 .

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814 NOTES, December 1992

imprecise much of the time (occasionally obscured by attempted erasures), acciden- tals are sometimes so careless as to be im- possible to sort out accurately. A score this hard to decipher will discourage conduc- tors (one can only hope the parts are in better shape). One has come to expect bet- ter quality from Boosey and Hawkes.

RICHARD BROOKS Nassau Community College

Maurice Ravel. Gaspard de la nuit, pour orchestre. Orchestration de Ma- rius Constant. Paris: Durand (Presser), 1990. [Score, 99 p. $56.00.]

Who could imagine anyone wanting to arrange that most pianistic of impressionist works, Maurice Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit, for full orchestra? The question is hardly an idle one, if one remembers that Ravel, the masterful orchestrator of Modest Mu- sorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, orches- trated a number of his own piano works but specifically avoided orchestrating others. Having scored four of the six movements of Le Tombeau de Couperin, for instance, as a concert suite, he left the Fugue and Toc- cata movements unorchestrated. It is also possible to say that Ravel achieved only mixed success in orchestrating his own works originally composed for another me- dium. The orchestrations of Alborada del gracioso and Ma Mere l'Oye are undeniably superb, but one may well ask whether those of Le Tombeau de Couperin or Valses nobles et sentimentales are of the same order of brilliance as the original versions; certainly they are elegant, well-controlled, even sub- tle, but they hardly represent a really new way of hearing their music.

With this in mind, and remembering that at this date Ravel's music is in no danger of injury from alien hands, we might say that there are two valid ways to approach orchestrating it: the safer path of approx- imating Ravel's orchestral style as closely as possible, and the more dangerous but po- tentially richer path of treating it with much greater freedom. From what I can tell by studying this score, without having heard a performance, Marius Constant has mostly chosen the cautious route, and I wonder whether he has been fully success- ful. Faithfulness to Ravel's original intent

cannot, in a piece like this, be precisely rendered by literal translation of pianistic details to orchestral details, and Constant's translation of Gaspard is literal to the point of excessive transparency, far more, I think, than Ravel himself would have liked. (Indeed, so precise is much of the tran- scription that Constant did not even correct Ravel's own figurational errors at mm. 4-7 of Ondine and 144-48 of Scarbo, whose cor- rections have been known to pianists for a long time.)

The most problematic of the three pieces in this regard is certainly Ondine. This is the climax of an entire decade of impressionist "water" pieces that began with Ravel's Jeux d'eau and Debussy's Reflets dans 1'eau and finished with the daybreak scene in Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe'. If one looks for a model among Ravel's orchestrations of his own piano music, there is Une barque sur l'ocean, which he orchestrated in 1906 but withheld from publication. Ondine is a considerably more complicated piano piece, and to transform its wonderful digital shimmer into orchestral sound calls for something more than the minutely detailed wind ar- peggios, celesta-harp figurations, and di- vided upper strings that permeate Con- stant's score. One wants to hear more in the orchestra that would suggest Ravel's pedal effects, but to achieve this, as for instance by reinforcing the lower register harmon- ically, would probably mean sacrificing much upper-register detail, and Constant has opted for detail.

Constant gives the famous B octave pedal point that runs through all of Le Gibet to two tubular bells (the lower bell is al- ternatively listed for a church bell, which, in the register called for, would weigh sev- eral tons). I think this was a dubious choice. The entire sense of Aloysius Bertrand's horripilating prose poem indicates that the listener doesn't know what is making the mysterious sound he hears. In any case, although the scoring in choirs of divided strings versus winds is a plausible one, it seems to me that many more changes of color are called for than Constant is willing to dare. (After all, Henri Gil-Marchex's well-known remark that to play Le Gibet required twenty-seven different kinds of touch could have been heeded in the or- chestral approach.)

Constant is most successful in Scarbo, whose explosive dynamics and furious ve-

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Music Reviews 815

locity and incisiveness call for an uninhib- itedly virtuoso approach. The orchestral models to be looked for would be Igor Stravinsky's Firebird ballet ( 1910 version), in which so much of the instrumental clarity is due to accentuated doubling of individ- ual notes, and Ravel's own orchestral works such as the Rapsodie espagnole. The orgas- mic crescendos of the latter work (for in- stance, its final two measures) are well re- flected in Constant's Scarbo. It is worth noting that Constant completely rebars this piece, condensing groups of four 3 mea- sures into one 18 measure, and similarly.

The orchestration calls for 3 flutes (in- cluding piccolo and alto flute), 3 oboes (in- cluding English horn), 3 clarinets (includ- ing clarinet in Eb), bass clarinet, 3 bassoons (including contrabassoon), 3 trumpets (in- cluding flugelhorn), 3 trombones, tuba, 2 harps, celesta, timpani, xylophone, glock- enspiel, tubular bells, antique cymbales, side drum, snare drum, bass drum, 2 sus- pended cymbals, sizzle cymbal, hi-hat, 2 tamtams (deep and very deep), triangle, slapstick, woodblock, castanets, ratchet (deep), thunder sheet, wind machine, and "geophone" ("a double-headed side drum filled with shot"; this was the same instru- ment called for by Olivier Messiaen in his Des canyons aux etoiles). Through an edito- rial oversight, not all of the percussion in- struments are listed at the front of the score.

MARK DEVOTO Tufts University

Anthony Philip Heinrich. The Yan- kee Doodleiad: A National Diverti- mento (1820) for string quartet and pi- ano. Philadelphia: Kallisti Music Press (810 South Saint Bernard Street), 1991 by Andrew Stiller. [Preface, pp. iii-iv; score, 72 p., $18.00; score and parts available, $47.00; duration: ca. 14'. Audition tape available, $3.00, may include up to 90' of music.]

Anthony Philip Heinrich. Scylla and Charybdis: Capriccio erratico for vio- lin and piano. Philadelphia: Kallisti Music Press, cl991 by Andrew Stiller. [Score, 36 p., and part, $23.00; dura- tion: ca. 15'. Audition tape available, $3.00, may include up to 90' of music.]

Anthony Philip Heinrich. The Co- lumbiad-petite fantaisie (1837) [pic- colo (later flute), 2 clarinets in A, bas- soon, 2 horns in D and A, trumpet in D and A, 2 violins, 2 violas, violoncello, contrabass]. Philadelphia: Kallisti Mu- sic Press, 1991 by Andrew Stiller. [Preface, pp. iii-iv; score, 117 p.; $18.00; parts (specify brass in original or modern keys), $29.00; duration: ca. 11'. Audition tape available, $3.00, may include up to 90' of music.]

Anthony Philip Heinrich, the eccentric Bohemian-American composer of the nine- teenth century, is, like Arnold Schoenberg today, more often discussed than per- formed. Unlike Schoenberg, however, there is a reason for Heinrich's lack of place on concert programs: his music has been (and largely remains) unavailable. In 1972 Da Capo Press reprinted Heinrich's The Dawning of Music in Kentucky (Philadelphia, 1820) and The Western Minstrel (Philadel- phia, [1820]) and, except for an occasional song or piano piece mostly drawn from these collections, they have remained the sole source of his music today. The en- graved music in the collections is often dif- ficult to read, as well as difficult to perform, causing all but the most determined of per- formers to pass Heinrich by. Nor has his music been well understood or appreci- ated. Much of it seems highly discursive, with unexpected flights of fancy, occasional interlinear remarks that seem more hu- morous than expressive, and many pas- sages that sound sentimentally banal to to- day's ears. Yet Heinrich was celebrated in his own day as "the Beethoven of America," and he left an enormous number of works in manuscript, many of which have never been heard. He deserves more than just an abstract discussion in textbooks on Amer- ican music history.

Andrew Stiller and the Kallisti Music Press of Philadelphia have begun to fill the lacuna in available editions of Heinrich's music. The three works under discussion here are worthy first additions to what is hoped may become a representative Hein- rich repertory of well-edited scores for modern performance. Stiller, the editor, holds a Ph.D. degree in composition from New York University and has contributed compositions to new music concerts and

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