ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about The Heart of Maurice Ravel from the french magazine La Nouvelle Revue Francaise. When it comes to music by Ravel, it is absolutely fascinating to hear an orchestration the wrong way up, that is to say with more wind instruments than strings, more percussion than bows. When, after the sublime Adagio and Fugue, the orchestra launched into the opening bars of the Rapsodie espagnole, with what delight Francis Poulenc realized, the other day, that Ravel was one of the greats, even beside the greatest, because he would in truth sacrifice the whole of music for Mozart's. Instrumental innovation does not only gather moss with time. Poulenc imagine some tune on the lines of the theme of the concerto, that is to say a melody nearer to the jazz of the rue Blanche and the Casino de Paris than to that of the nightclubs of Harlem.
