Most contemporary classical music fail to attract me for all the reason that I love Mozart, Bach and Vivaldi. The latter three are unfailingly calculated, symmetrical -- clean and unambiguous. No chord unresolved and no theme obscured. And so it seems incongruous that I should be enraptured by the antithesis - the imperfect dissonance and capriciousness of Ravel's piano music.
The best way I can describe a piece like La Valse or La Gaspard de Nuit is a theme trying to extricate itself from the dischordant sounds that overlie, and at times overwhelm, it. It emerges, like the head of a drowning body, at times. But this moment of clarity is tauntingly ephemeral, dying as quickly as its insidious entrance, flooded over by the shimmering trills and undulations across the keyboard.
To the listener, this seeming dysarthria of melody should be immensely unsatisfying. After all, do I not shudder all the way through most Charles Ives and Philip Glass? The latter two, fettered with discordance, asymmetry, sometimes fluid, sometimes staccato progression, leave me uneasy.
In the final analysis, I do not find Ravel satisfying. But this is precisely why I love him. His music is nebulous, dreamlike, haunting, and uncompromising in its resolve to disturb -- enthralling in its indigestive tendensies. Yet unlike Ives, I sense a profound yearning, an urgent desperation that is neither passionate nor fervent, but quiet, stiffled -- an internal, private brand of suffering that requires precipience to discern. It speaks of loneliness rather than despair. Not the quiet sobs reminicent of a Chopin Ballade or the poignancy of a Mendelsson Song. Ravel's loneliness intertwines with confusion, chaos, and intangible distance. It does not invite the listener into its psyche and evoke tears and empathy. Rather, it tells of a hopelessness and a void, and an ultimate sort of sadness - a limbo, nirvana.
Thibaudet was magical last evening; Thibaudet and Carnegie Hall together was perfection, and my bliss unsurmountable. It never fails to amaze me how music affects me, nearly to the point of tears.
