LDV109

19 PHILIPPE BIANCONI Is this feeling of solitude that you mention here and in connection with the Sonatine implicitly present elsewhere in the music? I think Ravel had a great loneliness deep inside him. You can hear it in many of his pieces – in the landscape of Oiseaux tristes in particular. I discovered the dark side of Miroirs when I perceived that feeling. Noctuelles conceals a heavy burden beneath its elusive discontinuity, its fleeting poetry, its volatility. Alborada del gracioso is a solitary portrait in which bitterness and tragedy come to the fore. Une barque sur l’océan is not only the contemplation of a seascape, but an expression of solitude: the boat is there, all right, but in my opinion it’s empty, and our gaze on this boat floating alone upon the immensity of the ocean awakens this human emotion. It’s a metaphor, a material projection of loneliness. There’s a sense of something felt, something experienced in this piece, which is shot through with sombre, distressing episodes. Finally, La Vallée des cloches is a nostalgic epilogue, a slightly detached observation of something in the distance.