The Beauty of Music: a piece from the community

Performer: Edmund Lee

 

A special recital by pianist and parishioner, Edmund Lee, focusing on the impressionistic beauty of Ravel.

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) was a French/Basque composer with an incomparably rich musical imagination; he also had the rare gift of being equally at ease writing for solo piano or full orchestra. His set of five Miroirs for piano, written between 1904 and 1905, are, as their title suggests, reflections in sound of a sequence of poetic images. I will be playing the first three as follows:-

Noctuelles - imagine a large open barn in summer in the south of France. The night air is heavy with heat, and night-moths ('noctuelles') are flapping against the roof-beams.

Oiseaux tristes - a beautiful, slightly desolate dreamscape.

Une barque sur l'océan - a stunning evocation of a boat being carried over the waters, sometimes calmly, but not without the odd storm. Right from the start, with its lapping cross-rhythms, the range of musical material is kaleidoscopic.