CAMA's Masterseries Presents Benjamin Grosvenor, piano ⫽ Friday, March 18, 2022 ⫽ Lobero Theatre, Santa Barbara ⫽ 7:30PM

In the four years before his death he
composed Iberia, 12 piano pieces in four
“books” of three pieces each, the first of
which premiered in May 1906. They each
evoke a specific part of Spain with local
dance idioms, associations that will be
lost on non‐Spaniards. The very first piece,
called Evocación, conjures up a sort of
A‐to‐Z tour of Spain by using dance idioms
from Navarre, at the French border in the far
north, and Andalusia in the far south.
El Puerto depicts the festival season in
El Puerto de Santa Maria, a city on Andalusia’s
southern Atlantic Coast where the
Guadalete River flows into the Bay of Cadiz.
El Corpus Christi en Sevilla celebrates another
festival, the feast of Corpus Christi,
in which the sanctified communion host is
carried in a procession through the streets
of Seville.
Maurice Ravel’s Jeux d’eau (Literally
“Water Games” or “Fountain”) dates from
his interminable and rather bizarre time
as a student at the Paris Conservatory. He
was admitted in 1889 when he was 14, but
made inadequate progress in the eyes of
the Conservatory administration. He was
dismissed in 1895, readmitted in 1897, and
dismissed again in 1900, but continued to
audit Gabriel Fauré’s composition class
until 1903. He also continued to enter the
Conservatory’s Grand Prix de Rome composition
competition until 1905, submitting
at least one entry that he must have known
would be disqualified for breaking traditional
rules of harmony and voice‐leading.
During this time he became a composer
of some prominence with the Pavane for
a Dead Princess in 1899 and Jeux d’eau in
1901, and was already a significant figure in
the French avant‐garde, so it is unclear why
he continued to try to win a competition
judged by the Conservatory’s very conservative
faculty. The Conservatory’s treatment
of Ravel became a noted scandal, known
as L’Affaire Ravel, which eventually forced
the director to resign. Fauré replaced him.
Ravel wrote, “Jeux d’eau is at the origin
of whatever pianistic innovations my works
may be thought to contain. This piece, inspired
by the noise of water and the musical
sounds emitted by fountains, waterfalls
and streams, is based on two themes, on
the model of a sonata first movement, but
without conforming to the classical plan of
key relations.” The first page bears a dedi­
Maurice Ravel (1925), Bibliothèque nationale de France
CAMA AT THE LOBERO THEATRE • BENJAMIN GROSVENOR
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