Thursday, February 17, 2011

Synyster Gates Martial Art

Ravel: The Secret Squirrel


Do you know what they reflected my beautiful eyes? The sky, the wind is free ...
Colette , book The Child and the Spells

THE SECRET OF THE SQUIRREL
by Patrick Crispini

L work of Maurice Ravel is deeply informed by the double extraction of the composer by his Basque mother, Switzerland by his father. Ambivalence that feeds a fertile inspiration from both solar and tender, nostalgic and lunar promoting mixing alchemy obsession mechanical movement and magical poetry.
By 1905, despite several setbacks in Prix de Rome, Ravel is recognized by his peers ... but confuses a public that barely detected under the shell contained modestly formal sensibility of the composer.

Nobody knows little or nothing about the privacy of this being secret passion for clocks and mechanical movements, including recurrent obsessions are reflected in the precision of his writing given to manuscripts without erasures or repentance.

supremely elegant and dandy, but shy and reserved, Ravel conceals his immense universe inside the confined space of a doll house , acquired in 1921 on the heights of Montfort-The Amaury, he made his living a sort of museum and strange fetish, which enters a circle of friends handpicked.

In the garden unfolds before his eyes, like a fan Mallarmé, pelvis, shrubs and Japanese tiny alleys draw a magic invisible to the profane.

After barely more than eighty works written more slowly - each representing a challenge, a unique attempt, as a masterpiece of craftsman - the composer must sit for the imprisonment and the gradual decay in a body no longer responds to his will, which left him speechless, unable now to write a musical note.

At 62, famous and yet unknown, it disappears after attempted an unsuccessful surgery in his brain but still lucid devastated by unfathomable depths.

The existence of Maurice Ravel seems so devoid of chips it becomes mysterious secret it reveals a personality which escapes analysis anecdotal virtuoso whose work, as measured, contains a refinement of orchestral and formal audacity and technical mastery of a rarely equaled.

Colorist sound, careful watch of orchestral colors, Ravel shows a solitary path, inhabited by the mechanisms of intelligence in the service of a nostalgic dream worlds of childhood.

Gradually needed refinement of his orchestrations chased: the gleaming Daphnis and Chloe written for the Ballets Russes, the famous Bolero designed as leading to a mechanical bullfight killing inevitable ( My masterpiece? The Bolero, see! Unfortunately, it is devoid of music " ), jokes of L'Heure espagnole melismas to sensual and tragic The waltz, the virtuoso Concerto for the Left Hand the wonders of Mother Goose or mysterious spells Child and the Spells ... his music is celebrated worldwide for over half a century.

The Bolero his decoy, her little need for orchestration ( "What a good turn I played the music world!" he says) is still probably the classical piece most often given in the world (one run every twenty minutes, in any form whatsoever!) and the work that has perhaps generated the most royalties in the twentieth century e . Ask the League of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers (SACEM) what she thinks of this unexpected windfall!

measured Engineering, catalog parsimonious: Ravel each album is a prototype, a particular challenge, a decisive issue. Each work represents a unique attempt to address a form in which to solve a technical problem or expressive. With the spirit of the engineer (which he sent his father), he designed his sound objects carefully. Like clockwork, before his precision engineering, it never ceases to provide a patent well made ...

In this great mechanic's dream : one Quartet two Concertos (one for the left hand which is a feat of virtuoso refinement to create the illusion of a game with two hands valid), only two attempts in the operatic field, Time English and Child and the Spells , which escape the cliches of the genre and remain UFOs in the sky of the opera.

It is not a sonata for each instrument: the cello, viola or violin (although a sonata for violin posthumous years of youth have been found). As if each new job was a kind of vital challenge, admitting only one solution.

He keeps his life during a holy horror of romantic pathos traditionally linked to his profession. Vocables factory, factory , industry ... recur in his rare public remarks.

He feared above all overuse words of inspiration , career, artist ...
They much prefer those of craftsman of invoice of technical of expertise.

His Bolero tells us, we put forth in each repetition of his little monotonous melody voluntarily, but the gradual intensity incandescent door senses: everything lies in the notes in the right invoice, in "round hand ".

Ravel does everything to remind us that these sets are wallpapers, these perspectives sham, these effects convention ... but simply an alloy of instrumental timbres éploie , a flute melody creeps, an aggregate of agreement seems ... and the magic Ravelian surrounds us, takes us to the countries of Asia of Scheherazade of Beauty and the Beast , "the land of nursery tales" (in Asia , Scheherazade, Tristan Klingsor).

with Ravel The miracle is that even as he reminds us that it is a illusionist, magic color enchants us immediately and we claim is: more, more!

no mistake: behind the spells are hiding dark cages, traps dizziness, abysses. What a phantasmagoria, smash objects unleashed, anxiety night he had to try to dominate the squirrel of The Child and the Spells can regain the original pink to restore the maternal lullaby in a chaotic world 's paradise long-lost childhood:

"It is good the child, it is wise " sings the chorus mezza voce at the end of the opera.

And the squirrel, saved by the child shows Track:

" do you know what they reflected my beautiful eyes? The sky, the wind is free ... "

Symbol foresight, agility, independence, savings ... sometimes malignancy (in medieval Christianity, the squirrel was often regarded as an incarnation Demon), the small red animal "leaking constantly and never allows himself to capture" aspires to climb laboriously. Ostentatious secrecy, "the squirrel trapped" Nicolas Fouquet, superintendent general of finances of Louis XIV, he did not squirrel as its emblem, surmounted by the motto Quo non ascendet (far does not rise it not)?
How not to think, faced with red plume of the animal, the nimble elegance of Ravel and remote, running his loneliness in Paris stunned by the Roaring Twenties, dandy pathos closed in the confined space his house, longing for the space lost virginity, of nymphs and elves, hiding in look any intruders draft of his work that will give the world the perfection of a partition without a trace of toil or temperature?

Colette has not taken wrong.
In Journal backwards, in 1941, she described the composer

"The years had taken off, with the ruffled shirt and pleated favorite its morgue small man. White hair and wore the black hair mingled with a sort of plumage and crossed her delicate hands talking rodent, touching everything in his eyes squirrel ... "

" I dream of a lyrical fantasy ... which I hope to do the work of my life " Ravel said about Child yet to come.
his life's work: there is no doubt that the squirrel never give us all the keys of safes and hiding he was pleased to enclose his generous spirit and hurt.
Needless to force mechanisms wonderful automata.
Timer Ravelian of winding gives us, if we are willing to listen with patience the heart, these territories of the be a simple breath can make them disappear.
a nightingale singing in the night, resurrects childhood rediscovered.

"Whatever my life! I just want to end it remains faithful to the child that I was "in Georges Bernanos wrote Great Cemeteries in the moonlight.

Patrick Crispini in The Watchmaker of dreams
© TransArt-March 2011

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