Ravel and His Contemporaries

This concert’s music dates from the first quarter of the 20th century—a time of great societal advances and innovations, but also terrifying anxieties, not unlike our own. It’s familiar as the era of Stravinsky’s barbarous Rite of Spring and Schoenberg’s break with tonality, yet home to numerous bright works that tell a very different story.

Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, from 1903, looks back to Debussy’s quartet of a decade earlier (a reflection often overstated) with uncommon warmth in music with a pensive nature, pursuing a series of conversations with itself. Vaughan Williams’s succinct Phantasy Quintet—a “phantasy” (otherwise spelled fantasy) favors the flow of themes over strict “movement” structures—premiered in 1914 and likewise matches soaring lyricism and high spirits with its own ruminations.

The British-American Rebecca Clarke’s Piano Trio discloses an incredible talent, long overlooked for the sadly obvious reason that she was a “she.” Composed in 1921—at the other end of World War I—it is a visionary statement that surely reckons with the unimaginable losses just passed. Ravel is said to have written his 1914 Piano Trio in great haste so that he could run off to fight in the new war (at age 41). We hear none of that in this work of signature light soulfulness defined by exquisite balance of its three voices.