Maurice Ravel - Trois Mélodies hébraïques

Maurice Ravel

Trois Mélodies hébraïques

1. Kaddisch
2. L'enigme éternelle
3. Meyerke, main Suhn

Daphna Cohen-Licht mezzo-soprano

No. 1, "Kaddisch," has on the surface a very un-Ravellian character. The singer bends and twists through a flashy, ethnically inflected (meaning, of course, Middle Eastern, in a manner sometimes seemingly authentic and sometimes less so), mock-improvised terrain to what is at first just sparse comment from the piano/orchestra. But, listening a little deeper, we realize that only Ravel would have fashioned those octave G naturals, and the sliding voice in between them, in just that way (and few indeed are the composers with courage enough to put the singer out there on a limb all alone for so much of the song!). As the song moves along and the piano begins a rich, harp-like arpeggiated accompaniment, which prompts something a little more song-like from the singer; Ravel as we know him comes rather more to the surface of the music.

No. 2, "L'énigme éternelle" is, by comparison with the ever-changing, gust-and-blow rhythmic quality of the previous song, as stable and steady as it gets. A quietly repeating one-measure cell starts up in the accompaniment at the very beginning of the song and never lets up; but the way Ravel allows this little unit to shift around chromatically is masterful, and it never grows stale. The song, whose dynamic spends most of the time at pianissimo and never grows more robust than piano, is a wonderful example of the kind of tranquil but shimmering musical understatement of which Ravel was so admirably capable.