My favorite fantasy of 2015 was sparked by Robert Craft's claim, in Stravinsky, that the Russian composer and his contemporary, Maurice Ravel, were intermittent sexual intimates: two diminutive men, the giants of 20th-century orchestration, understanding one another as only they could. "Gay" as we mean it is a post-Ravel denominator, and the composer, famously secretive about his sexual orientation and practices (though publicly plenty flamboyant) would have balked at the word. I'm not trying to appropriate Ravel (or Stravinsky), but is the idea of these two singular composers inhabiting alternative sexualities really distasteful?
Time has been kind to Ravel; the only limits the musical professionals place on his genius have to do with the comparatively few genres in which he composed. He's now known for music far beyond his once-ubiquitous Bolero; like Britten, he's good box office; and his music for solo piano only grows in stature. It's just had a major growth spurt by way of the new recording of the Complete Works for Solo Piano by Bertrand Chamayou (Erato).
The French pianist, still little-known our side of the Atlantic, though this release could finally change that, has that amalgam of fine muscle movement and savage imagination that is the hallmark of every great Ravel pianist. If you look at the compositions individually, the greatest recordings are not always by French pianists, but only a Francophobe would dispute that there's something in the genetics of this repertoire that only a French pianist can manifest.
The first to record a complete Ravel was Robert Casadesus, who made his recording "in the composer's presence," as we used to say. There's a little-known recording (sadly, not the one on YouTube, which is also fine) of Casadesus playing "Jeux d'eau" (the literal translation of which is "Water Sports") that I've never heard surpassed for its buoyancy, delicacy and otherworldliness �" until Chamayou's, which opens his two-CD set. Chamayou's is a sonic mist so fine (with the tricky note-values scrupulously observed) it evaporates on your imagination. It erases any doubt that this is precisely what Ravel was after.
The deeper, darker liquid that is the medium of "Ondine," in Gaspard de la nuit, is no less potently evoked, though Chamayou himself bows to Igor Pogorelich ("a law unto himself") in this work. But even if Chamayou's Gaspard isn't quite as haunting, overwhelming and, let it be said, extreme as Pogorelich's, it's a reading to be reckoned with, the wicked repeated notes in "Scarbo" dispatched with startling evenness and penetration. You never have the feeling the Chamayou is simply going for an effect, but everything is animated from deep within, individual, striking and novel without ever resorting to eccentricity.
Completists will be glad for a couple of short, early pieces not usually included in complete sets and irked at the exclusion of transcriptions like that of La Valse. Still, this set is amply complete, and then some, in the artistic sense. Two disc-ending extras, Siloti's "transcription" of "Kaddisch" from The Two Hebrew Melodies and Alfredo Casella's "A la maniere de Ravel," offer decisive proof that there is music "in the manner of Ravel," and then there's Ravel.
Ravel's contemporary Erik Satie was similarly assumed to be gay by most people who knew him, though it appears that his sexuality was far stranger than that, climaxing, so to speak, with his final years spent in an austere, Proust-like, celibate isolation. Decca is now re-releasing his complete solo piano works with gay pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, a superlative five-disc set I reviewed when it was new, this time with an additional disc of the music for two pianos with Pascal Roge and Jean-Philippe Collard. A word to the wise.
But a measure of Satie's impact on later gay coevals is evident from the fact that his "symphonic drama" Socrate , best-known through the composer's own version for voice and piano, has been a direct influence on subsequent artists including Virgil Thomson (who brought it to the grateful attention of Gertrude Stein), John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Mark Morris. It has just reappeared, in its full, spellbinding magic, with its ideal present-day interpreters, soprano Barbara Hannigan and pianist Reinbert de Leeuw (Winter and Winter).
What is Socrate? Arguably a descendant of Berlioz's cantatas, it is a setting of three texts by Plato, from the Symposium, Phaedrus and Phaedo, only the last of which, "The Death of Socrates," could be deemed dramatic in the usual sense of the word �" though in that long third part, the music amasses a cumulative emotional resonance. By the highly austere standards of Satie's better-known, diaphanous compositions, it's rich, particularly in the surging piano part, and the vocal music unfurls in long tendrils of serpentine hypnotic power. It was commissioned by Princess Edmond de Polignac, who insisted that the vocal part be sung only by a woman, and, in a scandal, was later revealed to be a lesbian. Satie called Socrate "white" music, for which he had to prepare himself by eating only white foods. It has, you could say, some built-in exoticisms.
As performed by Hannigan and De Leeuw, it's captivating stuff, with a startlingly insistent sense of narrative line, even if the drama is largely in the mind. The miracle of Hannigan's soprano, which can suddenly bloom into Technicolor out of a vibrato-free line, is endless in its fascinations. The pair precedes Socrate with seven songs that hew much more closely to the cool, chaste yet entrancing style with which Satie is more often associated. There are dreams and angels galore, the latter with "lutes shivering under their fingers." Enchantment is assured and unalloyed, if only you give yourself to it. It's music that wants absinthe or opium, but is intoxicating without, particularly as delivered by these canny, alluring musicians.
One of the mysteries of Satie is how he could be so prolific with material of such fundamental simplicity, music at once satiric and satyric. He'd surely hate it if we figured out how, and would prefer if we listened, rapt.