“I believe this sonata marks a tuming point in the evolution of my career. The dispossession is pushed lo the extreme and involves the renunciation of the charmof harmony and an increasingly pronounced orientation in the direction of the melody”. After the iliuminating words of Maurice Ravel, in his Esquisse autobiographique. I do noi think it is necessary to add much more to teli this amazing Sonate for violin and cello which cosi the author more than a year and a hall off work.
The renunciation of harmony and its seduction, a self-limitation operated by composing only two voices to privilege the intertwining between the two ìnstruments (at times hardly distinguishable in the hìgh register, the celio part ìs in fact extremely difficult to play) creating a•melodie labyrinth", as Restagno suggests in his fundamental text on Ravel (1). A sort of contrapuotal distillate where each note lives and moves as a duo with another singlevoice: Duo was in fact also the first title of the Sonata, whose first performance took place on Aprii 6, 1922 with interpreters Hélène Jourdan Morhange on violin and Maurice Maréchal on the cello. In Ravel's letters we find news of tlhe Sonate for violin and piano from January 1924, but the Author completed it only in April 1927. Ravel had already composed a sonata tor this ensemble in the early years of the Conservatory, in the composition class by Gabriel Fauré, bui he did noi consider to include it in his catalogue and was only publlshed in 1975 with the tille of Sonate posthumous. The first movement is based on two man themes of great beauty and lyricism, the tirsi almost drawn as a sweet and sinuous outline of hills, the second, more archaic and static, thanks to the empty fifths of the piano that create an arcane atmosphere under the almost poignant theme of the violin. To shore up the whole first hall in continuos intertwining between violin and piano, however, is the idea that represents the nostalgia tor the French country side felt by the author during a voyage by ship to England and which is detined by Ravel himself similar to a "Chicken verse•: a very rhythmic, almost onomatopoeic incision thanks to the use of an "acciaccatura". The second movement is a Moderato which Ravel will call Blues, revealing with this choice the ìnfluences of African American music from aoross lhe ocean that had largely contaminated European musical taste.
The violin begins almost like a banjo, plucking chords with staggered accents while the piano, alter many bars of waiting, plays an empty fiflh on the bass, solitary and enigmatic (see the second theme of the first movement) and even lower, a dottet rhythm appears which immediately gives the song the swing. The violin then seems to improvise a jazz melody, complete with glissandi and searches for not exactly pure and uncontaminated sounds. The third and last movement is a further twist after the unbridled imagination and expressivenss of the Blues we have a highly effective Perpetuum mobile, with sensational and arduous arpeggios very fast musical scales, repeatednotesof the v1olinwhile the piano , againwithasort ofaplomb almost creating adistance between the two instruments, it will propose elements that have a lot in common with the rhythmic and thematic materiai of the two previous movements.