LENOX – The piano music of Maurice Ravel, jewels in both the lapidary and watchmaking senses, has long accessorized recitals; to gather all of it in one place, as pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet is doing over three programs this week at Tanglewood, feels almost like a heist.
(Thibaudets survey continues tonight, and then on Sunday afternoon, performing both of Ravels piano concertos with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.) Last nights opener collected works commenting on musics past; like the Galerie dApollon, the repository of those French crown jewels that managed to survive revolutions and tumult, these were treasures with memories.
In Ravels early-career, 1895 Menuet antique, a brittle version of that vintage dance undercuts nostalgia while a smooth, dreamy trio acknowledges its allure; but in the 1909 Menuet sur le nom dHaydn, Ravel pays the older master the compliment of a thoughtful, personal evocation. Thibaudet gave the Menuet antique a touch of asperity – limpid phrases tartly clipped off – echoed in the angular, youthfully impish Srnade grotesque. But the later minuet, along with the equally distilled 1913 Prlude, had a more forthright elegance (as did Thibaudets non-Ravel encore, Chopins op. 9 no. 2 Nocturne).
Past and (Ravels) present mingled in a pair of expert impressions. la manire de Borodine plays it straight, a deft Franco-Russian waltz. But la manire de Chabrier works mischief on Gounod, the older generation, saucily updating an aria from Faust into the hazy manner of Chabrier, Ravels early inspiration.
In Miroirs, completed in 1905, Ravels own finely bedecked style comes into full bloom. Ravel turns the pianos essential discontinuity, its discrete hammer-on-string impacts, against itself, conjuring flow with a density of attacks, cutting so many facets into the music that the angles converge on long arcs. Miroirs, each movement dedicated to a fellow young artist, is saturated with such effusive challenge.
Thibaudets approach was fleet, restrained, transparent. Intricacies were realized with astonishingly even rapidity and lightness, the facets still sharp; the chain of melody was distinct and lustrous, the virtuosity seeming to glitter in the reflected light of the larger structure, an insouciance of exceptionally fluent understatement. But in Le Tombeau de Couperin, the movements now dedicated to friends lost to the First World War, while the virtuosity still coursed (Thibaudet dispatched the Prlude with blistering speed), the provocations are sobered by the symmetries and repetitions of Baroque forms. This Menuet was gentle but obsessively ornamented; the Forlane chased its tail with eerily even richness. Thibaudet finally unleashed untrammeled power in the Toccata, rage so fiercely articulate as to border on exuberance. In the soul of Thibaudets discretion, Ravels unsentimental precision encircled both confidence and grief.
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