Maurice Ravel: À la manière de
Maurice Ravel: Jeux d’eau
Maurice Ravel: Pavane pour une enfant défunte
Maurice Ravel: Gaspard de la nuit
Ludwig von Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 37
Nathanaël Gouin: Piano
Charlotte Chahuneau: Violin
Raphaël Jacob: Violin
Sarah Jacob: Cello
Jérémy Pasquier: Viola
After a string of wonderfully varied concerts in nearby villages and one in downtown Dieulefit this past month, last week my mom and I were very much looking forward to attending two high-quality concerts organized by Les musicales (The musical events) association that would take place… literally next door to my mom's place! Now how about that? Apart from having them in her living room or yard, which might have been a bit too much of a good thing, we could not have asked for a more convenient location. And in fact, I almost did not care that they started at the still kind of ungodly time of 9:00 PM.
The only thing that remained for us was to figure out where they would exactly take place, les Sources de Dieulefit being a vast resort comprising hotel rooms, seminar facilities, wellness services and a restaurant, but no entertainment venue. But not knowing where we were going could not keep us from performances by French pianist extraordinaire Nathanaël Gouin and the sterling-resume-carrying musicians of the Trio Jacobs and friends, all of them being superb musicians who had impressed us big time last year.
So on Wednesday night, after separate walks in the park following the ubiquitous signs, my mom and I met up outside one of the estate’s beautifully restored former barns, which, on top of it, turned out to have decent acoustics too despite a low ceiling. We were happy, although not particularly surprised, to see quite a few familiar faces in the audience packing the spacious venue, and while the general organization left a lot to be desired—If you want concert-goers to give you their tickets, you may want to stand by the entrance as they come in. Oh, and having programs handy may not be a bad idea either—we eventually found excellent seats next to a couple of friends.
To fully enjoy a virtuoso’s super-natural skills, it is best to have challenging works composed by another virtuoso, and that’s exactly what we got on Wednesday night, as Nathanaël Gouin had decided to tackle several challenging pieces by 20th-century France’s fearlessly ground-breaking and amazingly wide-ranging composer, conductor and pianist Maurice Ravel to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the artist’s birth. It takes one to know one, and apparently to play one.
And what a stupendous birthday feast it was! The celebration started rather inconspicuously with the Prélude and other short amuse-bouches, but it quickly gathered speed, substance and complexity with Gouin’s brilliantly playful Jeux d’eau (Ciao Italia!) and soberly elegant Pavane pour une enfant défunte (¡Hola España!), before wrapping up the party with the thrilling tour de force that is the three drastically different and awfully taxing movements of Gaspard de la nuit (Coucou la France!), which Gouin handled with poise, heart and, yes, impressive virtuosity.
After the intermission, during which my mom’s friend and long-time piano teacher Jacqueline marveled at Gouin’s exceptional talent and a nearby acquaintance and piano student wondered aloud how he could “produce such sounds”, the man was back onstage with the Trio Jacob’s musicians and violinist Charlotte Chahuneau. And they were all there to share with us a very cool experiment, namely a chamber music version of Ludwig von Beethoven’s magnificent Piano Concerto No. 3, the one that took the composer 6 years to complete.
But hey, milestone works do take time, and this concerto, which boldly moves from purely classical structure to the more ambitious and passionate style that will come to define its maker, has proved many times over that it had been worth the wait.
One obviously cannot expect the same musical experience from a full orchestra and from a string quartet, but I can now say that they are both equally satisfying in their own way. I will also add that the radically downsized and wonderfully intimate performance we got to hear on Wednesday night superbly highlighted the inner structure of the piece, and therefore allowed us to appreciate the composition on a whole different level.
Moreover, having the opportunity to hear Gouin—and to watch his magical fingers—again in a totally different context was another rewarding treat, so extremely rewarding in fact, that we did not even mind the absence of an encore, or at least not that much (Little sigh).
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