The September program of Camerata Pacifica’s 2024-2025 season will feature Cameratans Paul Huang (violin), Santiago Cañón-Valencia (cello), and Gilles Vonsattel (piano), performing works by Claude Debussy (1862-1918) and Maurice Ravel (1875-1937).
Three works are slated: Maurice Ravel’s “Sonate in a-minor for Violin and Cello, M73 (1920-1922),” Claude Debussy’s “Images for Solo Piano, Book II, L120 (1907),” and Ravel’s “Piano Trio in a-minor, M67 (1914).”
I would call Debussy and Ravel the “giants” of French Impressionism, but for the fact that “gigantic” is just about the last word that ought to be applied to their music; ditto “titans,” etc. Both were uncomfortable with the term, at the very least, and Debussy was actively hostile: “Imbeciles,” he wrote in 1908, “call what I am trying to write in ‘Images’ ‘impressionism’, a term employed with the utmost inaccuracy, especially by art critics who use it as a label to stick on Turner, the finest creator of mystery in the whole of art!” Ravel was content to assert that the term “could not be adequately applied to music at all.”
Quite naturally, people reject the labels that their contemporaries slap on them. Phillip Glass told me he was not a “minimalist,” and Karl Marx insisted that he was not a “Marxist.” Although he was quite consciously founding a school of psychological treatment, Sigmund Freud called it “psycho-analysis,” not “Freudianism.”
Be that as it may, and under the working hypothesis the term actually means something, Wikipedia says that “the most prominent feature in musical Impressionism is the use of ‘color’, or in musical terms, timbre, which can be achieved through orchestration, harmonic usage, texture, etc. Other elements of musical Impressionism also involve new chord combinations, ambiguous tonality, extended harmonies, use of modes and exotic scales, parallel motion, extra-musicality, and evocative titles such as ‘Reflections on the water’, ‘Mists’, etc.”
Like all attempts to describe music in words, the above utterly fails to convey any sense of how the music actually sounds. (What the hell can “extra-musicality” even mean?) Yet there seems to me to be at least an affinity between the music of Debussy and the paintings of Claude Monet (1840-1926) or Georges Seurat (1859-1891), as if they were trying to do the same thing in different media—even if the word “Impressionism” doesn’t go very far in describing that affinity.
Ravel is clearly the protagonist here (and, in my opinion, the better composer), with two major works to Debussy’s short set of exquisite miniatures. The “Sonate” that opens the concert is dedicated “to the Memory of Claude Debussy,” and it is composed with a kind of looseness and vagueness that does recall the older master. The “Trio” that concludes the program is Ravel at his best: finely woven, with clear, lovely melodies and a solid sense of direction.
This program will be played at 3 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 15, in Scherr Forum, Thousand Oaks; 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 17. at The Huntington in San Marino; 8 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 19, at the Colburn School in Los Angeles; and at 7 p.m. Friday, Sept. 20, at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara.
Tickets to the Santa Barbara performance are $75, and they can be purchased by phone at 805.884.8410, or on line at https://cameratapacifica.org/concerts-24-25/