L’heure Espagnole (CD, Br-Klassik)

Spain was the country where many French composers of the 19th and early 20th centuries longed for music, just think of Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen or Maurice Ravel’s Rhapsodie espagnole (1907) and his famous Boléro (1928). In Ravel’s first stage work, the one-act musical comedy L heure espagnole (The Spanish Hour), which premiered in Paris in 1911, he already served that Iberian fashion with a fairy-tale-comic plot set in Toledo and speaking music full of local Spanish color: the short opera closes with a fiery habanera. Ravel incorporated the clockworks that sounded in the shop of the master watchmaker Torquemada into his score in a masterly and extremely humorous way: the tick-tock of the clocks, the most varied chimes or mechanical music automatons, which can be heard with cuckoo calls at the full hour. Emmanuel Chabrier’s Rhapsody for orchestra with the promising title España was composed in 1883 and premiered in Paris. The music is due to a trip to Spain that the composer had undertaken the year before and on which he had written down many original motifs and rhythms. Spanish folklore is always present; In addition to the melodies, it is above all the rhythmic motifs and movement patterns that, when combined, achieve a complexity that was unknown in art music of the time. A rousing piece in rapid three-beat dance. A concert performance of the two works took place on April 24, 2016 as part of the Sunday concerts in Munich’s Prinzregententheater and can now be experienced on CD. Ravel’s opera (in its original French) will be interpreted by young soloists who are all masters of the French-Spanish subject; it accompanies the Münchner Rundfunkorchester under the direction of Asher Fisch.