Klasik Müzik - Ravel-Le Tombeau

Amazing. "Le Tombeau de Couperin" fills a sweet spot for me between Debussey and Gershwin. Angela Hewitt performs brilliantly from start to finish.

Just wonderful. One of my favorite interpretations thus far!

Glad you enjoyed it!

great performance, always moving forward, just like how Ravel (a neoclassical composer) should be. the unbalanced tone of the piano (too bright lacking full bodied sound) seems inadequate for the repertory, which is more evident in forte passages like the beginning of the rigaudon.

some people really are forgetting just how insanely difficult this suite is to pull off amazingly

It could be better if the image is in the keyboard, permanently, instead the face or body of the pianist.

Superb. I fell in love with her Bach years ago. Actually, I fell in love with Angela. We were introduced by her parents, we met, but it was not fated to be ;-) I never thought to hear her play this piece, one of my all-time favourites. I loved every moment of it, but, as I've said elsewhere, hearing her play the fugue, it finally made _sense_ to my ears and became a real, warm piece of music, not a dry intellectual exercise. I hope I can find my score. (I believe it's public domain on IMSLP now though). Thank you, Angela {{{{}}}} and thank you to CBC & whoever posted this.

One of my fave Ravel orchestra pieces, but yes, this piano version is quite wonderful. My hat, once again, is taken off in honour of Ms.Hewitts' artistry.

Entonner les brasures entières par les segments de la distance aérienne

절제되어있지만 생동감 넘치며 굉장히 심각하면서도 표현하는 것이 들었던 쿠프랭의 무덤 중 제일 좋네요

Brava. She seems to be having a great deal of fun during the Rigaudon.

瑞典的爵士鋼琴天才美女!so well

Isn't she Canadian?

few shits coughing are wasting this masterpiece

A little too controlled and calculated for my taste. Didn’t give me any shivers. The Fazioli is rather characterless.

Thank you, Yves Tumor.

just happened upon this while looking at Couperin performances. I see I wrote a note five years ago! and still stand behind it!

Fabulous. Enjoyed this very, very much.

Glad you like it!

The more I listen to other interpretations, the more I am impressed by this one.

elegant

The forlane is played way too fast imo

Heartbreaking, beautiful ... music and performance

I love her performance of this wonderful work!

OH, IF ONLY PIANISTS WOULD SLOW DOWN AND ENJOY THE RIDE. PLAYING FAST IS LIKE HAVING SEX TOO FAST OR EATING YOUR DINNER AT THE SPEED OF CHOPIN´S MINUTE WALTZ. RELAX, AND SMELL THE ROSES AND TAKE TIME TO LOOK AT THE TREES.

Ron Walker It’s at the tempo Ravel wrote. If you are going to be angry be angry at Ravel.

Must have had Couperin turning over in his grave.

Man does not live by Bach alone. Wow this

The Forlane does tend to go on and on with all those repeats

I really enjoyed this. It's such a direct, straight forward performance, and I really appreciate that. I'm enough decades away from my formal music education – and from all the tension in the classic music world – that I can just receive this charming, unusual-for-its-time music. So simply, delivered, with no obvious ego in the way.

https://youtu.be/JqrKi_aKU_w10 year's old inspired by Angela. Thank you for such a good performance.

Is Pavane for a dead Princess part of the performance?

happy birthday and bonne fete, cher Ravel

Ptn mais y en marre des blaireaux qui vont au concert pour tousser

I know she is a marvellous musician and pianist, yet find it odd that no one seems to have commented on the fact that she is quite an attractive woman.

Just wonderful performance of this amazing suite of pieces by Ravel. OK, so it isn't note-perfect, but who cares. Angela's interpretation is just brilliant!

Bravo! Excellent performance! One of the best!

She gets the emotions right.

la musique n'est pas un language puisse qu'elle prend la place de ce que l'on ne peut exprimer par des mots. Vive Ravel, Bill Evans Art Tatum et le PSG.

Fazioli !

Great player. But.... (and maybe it is the recorded sound) but the whole first section sounds like a rushed mush, with little rhythmic impulse. If this piece needs anything it's absolutely clarity and a decent pulse. Why does everyone play Le Tombeau so fast? It really benefits from slowing down.

Replying to Queen Kirlia, I almost always prefer the piano version of any piece to the orchestral one. There's so much more clarity.

j aimerais savoir ce qui ce passe dans sa tete quand elle joue.

Angela has given us the complete solo piano music of Ravel(sans coughs). These two disks are aural magic that we can visit again and again although it's wonderful to see a visual presentation as we don't often get to see her live(if ever). My great luck was to see her here in my home town in concert and recital. She is truly magnificent in performance and gracious to engage in conversation. I hope you will all be blessed to see her but we are blessed with her numerous recorded releases and You Tube postings.

She excels in everything she plays but she plays French repertoire as if she is in a class by herself. Such a great marvel to behold! Vive Mademoiselle Hewitt!

When something is originally written for the piano it's almost always better than any orchestrated version, as Angela Hewitt demonstrates so eloquently here!

it seems wrong somehow that the applause is so much louder than the piano! [obv it isn't but sometimes an audience will listen to the silence after a piece before clapping - I heard this recently after Debussy's Quartet - and that is/ was v moving]

00:00 Prelude3:08 Fugue6:35 Forlane12:21 Rigaudon15:34 Menuet21:22 ToccataMs Hewitt's playing a Fazioli, either an F278 (her preferred instrument) or an F308; note the unique fourth pedal.

What does the fourth pedal do?

Keyboard Dancers I was lucky enough to perform on a Fazioli piano...It’s like driving a Ferrari!

Thanks, you have saved my life!

@Brian Numme I played one a few months ago; agree, they are the Ferrari of pianos!

Guy Did Ail ensemble it brings the hammers closer to the strings，it is like the left pedal on an upright

アンジェラヒューイットさんは、とても品があり、温かい音を出すピアニストです。応援しています。ありがとうございます。

Sorry Lucas. But Ican hear it in USA.

Full of orchestral colours and virtuosity!!

what an extraordinary pianist. such sensitivity and might. beauty of music enhanced by her playing of it.

brilliant

"Sans ralentir..non rellantando".vif(lively)=144. Practice only as fast as you can play@4:00minutes. SEE: M207-250 Right&Left: bottom thumbs carry inner voice lines. Depression of key and release with high finger articulations helpful.

Beautiful!!!

incredible

Isn't this the most unique sounding fugue in all piano literature? Ravel, in this entire work, combines the styles of the French baroque with French 20th Century to arrive at a hybrid world of musical expression. It takes extraordinary interpretive skill and technique to successfully perform this work. Some critics below understand a simplified version of piano technique that understands the horizontal plane, but doesn't get the vertical one. It's in the vertical plane, that the most musical expression can be tapped into to properly execute the phrasing.

Would you rather I write a thesis on the entire work, Mike Karren? I am currently studying it, and yes, every movement is wonderful and beautifully inventive (not to mention, difficult.) Angela certainly "tears" it up, but I only listened once, because I don't want to allow my interpretation to become someone else's, if that makes sense. I hope to be able to perform the piece and affect the audience as well as she does, when the time comes! As to the horizontal and vertical suggestions, maybe you would rather I use the words "gesture," "weight," "finger technique", "tone production," etc... It's all good...

.... nice recovery :-) ... a fine, fine performance almost is like tasting a good wine, isn't it?  :  the words are all a little lacking, sometimes, until even the half-pianists (that would be me! :-) ...  and all of us knowing a little about music, could all agree on defintions of  'gesture', 'tone production', etc. etc.  Just keep at it; hopefully I'll be alive to hear your performance of this some day on a medium like this...

Mike, what an odd comment you write. The horizontal is, put simply, the melodic, the vertical is the harmonic. Music is a language written on two planes. Try reading Schoenberg's Fundamentals of Musical Composition.

@Philip Amos Nice of you to call his comment odd. It deserves to be called some other things, too. Hostile, arrogant, dismissive all come to mind.

@Jesse Davis I never liked the fugue until this moment, and generally avoided playing it myself. Of course the entire performance is marvelous, but Angela opened the fugue to me in a way I've never heard it before. I can't put it in words, but my _ears_ understood!

Very competent. the style is very English, that is, extremely musically-shaped, perhaps arguably too much, disturbing the flow....?

{22:40-23:30} Pure splendor and awesomeness!!

21:15 the look you make when ur home alone and someone knocks on the door

true - and it's That Fugue!

oops sorry it's Toccata

even better! [borrowed by Kate Bush and others I think]

25:06 was funny

just beautiful, thumbs up

Fantastic! The toccatta is so spectacular the first time I heard it I thought there were four hands or two pianos, ha!

メヌエットのいいところで咳がぁ・・。

They should have kicked this coughing idiot out of the concert hall. If you have the coughs, stay home, don't go to a concert.

If you want to hear music with no distracting sounds, hire the musician for a private performance or stay home and listen to the CD.

an idiotic response, if ever there was one

It is quite distracting and unfortunate.

I'm sure there were a lot more coughers in Ravel's time - more tuberculosis. Modern audiences have it easy.

Overall, a fast, lively, and gorgeous performance but that bump at 1:19 in Prelude made me grit my teeth! Also some movements were played excessively fast while Rigaudon was too slow for my liking. Tocatta was my favorite, though!

6:39 is my favorite part!

Amazing playing. Brilliant stuff.

i wish i had a stienway and  auditorium like that when i practice... who am i kidding,... i could never sound like that on the piano, not to mr\ention such complex pieces like that

Ravel's Le tombeau de Couperin isn't a complex piece, but it is instead a piece of beauty dedicated for those who died (a memorial). Just to say.

ugh everything is blocked in Germany -________-

that is too bad, this music gives me comfort and that would be nice for you as well.

Lukas (yes, it's too bad... a friend of mine living in Germany says the same thing often :-( ) ... This is a great performance -- out of these 25 minutes, she only goes wrong about 3 measures when she forgets where she is, momentarily. Otherwise, it is stunning, because she performs it beautifully...  Sorry it is unavailable there.

use tor https://www.torproject.org/download/download.html.en

VPN is your friend

You should try China

Ravel must have been waiting in heaven all along for Angela Hewitt to show up, and then ...

+Johnny MacMillan < Once the note is struck, there's nothing more you can do with the sound. > This completely misunderstands the nature of the relationship between the pianist and the piano. It's not about "striking the note", your whole body is involved with the piano before, during and after playing a note.

@Richard Hillier​ I understand why you think that, and I agree to a certain extent, but there's practicality that's important to consider. Just as raising your hands well above the keyboard doesn't help you find the next chord/note and often hinders your ability to do so. One can talk about the relationship between pianist and piano but some of these flourishes just aren't necessarily technically good. And technique is neither robotic nor dogmatic as many people think. Hewitt's a good pianist, I can't say I'm better of course, and I'm not saying she'd play better under my guidance. I'm just not sold on her interpretation and part of it is that it strikes me as undisciplined.

Undisciplined, yes. And Ravel would have perhaps been horrified. But it works for me.

THEN, ANGELA PLAYED SO FAST THAT SHE RUSHED RAVEL INTO HEAVEN BEFORE HIS TIME.

There are a variety of reasons -- often practical -- for this kind of choreography. I avoided such things for many years and then found it was natural for me. For me, it is not about technique, per se, and I use the word "choreography" because there is rhythm, meter, melody, harmony, and meaning all working together. The challenge is not whether it inhibits the ability to find the next note, but whether it becomes the cause of the interpretation rather than the effect.Having said that, I generally agree with your comments about the momentum. I think a pianist should be instructed to some degree by the orchestral performance of this, which would not have such starts and stops, although I think it should *inform* the pianist and not be mimicked. I played le Tombeau for my father in a special recital, knowing he would be gone in a couple of weeks. In particular, the minuet was my personal statement to him from this piece, so I have pretty strong feelings about it. As such, I hear the bookends as spun sugar to be handled delicately and not pulled an pushed like that.

When Ms. Hewitt plays the Rigaudon, she looks like she's trying to keep control of a classroom of 88 first-grade students. I love her performance overall, this is such a fun suite.

omg this is wonderful

Wow. The quiet intensity of that fugue is just something.

I never liked the fugue before. Dry & uninteresting I thought. Wow! Angela showed me how it really sounds!

There is some amount of rubato going on in the Minuet, but the important thing is that Ms. Hewitt knows both where and where not to use that particular effect.  The result is quite stunning.

I'm going to misquote Francis Poulenc: Playing piano without rubato is like making a sauce without butter. Actually Poulenc _said_ he disdained rubato (his remark was about _pedal_ ). But every fine performance of Poulenc I've heard has just a little rubato. I've never heard whether he recorded anything himself? But Ravel? We're in impressionism, not Les Six's post-romantic modernism. Rubato is essential IMHO. And I think Angela makes the case in her performance.

I especially like the way she plays the Forlane, but all of her playing here is really superlative. (She does make an error in the Forlane at about 8:20, but we forgive her because she dares a great deal when she plays and she always plays well.)

Honestly, this is my most favorite piece for solo piano. Not even the orchestral arrangement can live up to this.

comes close for me...very close. I still love the albeniz pieces but this is coming very close

I love it dearly. I used to struggle through parts of it myself. So happy to hear Angela playing it. But if you want to hear something amazing, listen to the organ transcription at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHxcmcDxlGM. I would not have thought such a pianistic piece would work on the organ, but it's as though Ravel had written it for the organ, from the liquid flow of the Prélude to the overwhelming Toccata with full organ 32' reeds and all. I dare to think Ravel would have liked it!

Thank you Angela Hewitt for your sublime artistry!  And for performing in Seattle recently...

Gr8 wibez m9!

Gorgeous performance!

Was she playing on a Fazioli F278 piano? the piano sounds so clear.

There are two types of youtube comments on videos like this..."Why this isn't perfect" and "Why you shouldn't worry about why this isn't perfect."

Don't forget the odd ones that criticize clothing and facial expressions

I tell you the truth. . . 😥

I'm not a musician but a music lover. The comments on classical music pages are the most informed and civil I've read among various subject matters, esp literature

guess what? nothing's perfect, ever

Not half bad from someone who is playing entirely from memory.

I didn't notice that slip on 25:06. It sounded so Ravel-esque!

There's another unfortunate one at 8:22. But she recovers nicely.

I know everyone has those moments, even the best of them, and I know it's nothing to worry about...but I can't help but love hearing someone besides me doing it! Sometimes a slip makes me wonder if I have misread the music, but she really made a pig's breakfast of that little passage.

@Aaron Dyer Sometimes I find I _have_ misread the music. "What, that's not a G# there...mmm...ah...oh, it is...

%$#@!! she is good.  Normally I much dislike facial goings-on during a performance (I think of Gould, and Lang Lang), but somehow hers seem very natural, genuine, even endearing.  Very fine.  O Canada.

great performance i wait you in tokyo suntory hall and ouji hall 

What  a mess she makes of  the Toccata!!!!!!!!!!  A rather overrated pianist.

@Mister T - The performance of the last movement is almost note perfect except for two bits at the end of the toccata. Can you play it any better?

SUPERB! GLORIOUS! SUBLIME! BRILLIANT! BRAVISSIMO!!! A great privilege to behold.And I would remind the nitpickers and faultfinders among us that none other than Albert Schweitzer said:"CRITICS are those who have FAILED in MUSIC and ART."

+Hyramess Hiramess With respect, that's bullshit.

Are you a music critic, Richard? Or are you referring to the ecstatic response to the performance?

Don't be so critical about critics

Well, maybe. I have failed in being musician, but not as a listener of music. In any case I do not consider a fault is enough to sink a good work. In this case, miss Hewitt did a good one.

And as Horowitz said in 1843 « critics suck ass man »

Vous allez TROP vite !!!! On ne peut pas comprendre le thème !!!!

@Giovanni Smartini - Mais no, Gio. C'est le tempo de concert plus ou moins des concertiste et chefs d'orchestres autour du monde, ces jours-ci. Moi, j'entend les thèmes tous clairs. En plus, les tempos sont précisement indiqué dans la partition avec metronome, et Hewitt les suis bien prôche.

+lagunagreg Ah, oui! Je suis d'accord; c'est subtil et complexe, et ça semble intéressant.

Hermosa composición, un reto poder tocarla así, a la perfección, solo que mientras me imaginaba en mi mente un paisaje con esa melodía de fondo, eso tos del señor la arruino...

Another superlative performance by Ms. Hewitt! What is perfection in music? The diversity of interpretation draws one to a favourite or some favourites - that is all. I agree we should love the performance and abandon hypercriticism in favour of childlike aural pleasure. Angela Hewitt is one of greatest gifts to our musical experience.

Her tempos are pretty much as marked by Ravel. People should stop listening for the performance they think they want to hear and listen to what the musician is doing that's unique - and there's a lot here to listen for.

The invaders

Let them fuckin know! Yes!

Thank you for your kind words, Paul! It seems like we both wrest more enjoyment out of these amazing artists than we ought, choosing to not know any better!

Thank you PAUL nice to hear your kind words Happy New Years!

P.S.---I marvel at the quietness of her playing style. No flourishes that I can see. Although no photos or films exist, it was said that Rach played in the very same way...

Pianists play the same music for years.Any average mentality can memorize hundreds of  pieces. She plays this at pretty much the tempo everone plays it and uncovers movement and detail, and layers of fine textures,voicings that most of us will never even become aware of. Amateurs always find everything played professionally too fast -Cuz THEY DONT KNOW REALLY THE MUSIC.SLOWED DOWN SO U CAN PLAY IT IT IS NOT EVEN THE IDEA THE COMPOSER HAD IN MIND IT IS JUST PAPER PLAYING.wHAT MOST DO HA LITTLE TO DO WITH THE COMPOSER- BECAUSE WRITTEN MUSIC IS A LONG WAY FROM SHOWING US THE SECRET FORMS AND PERSONALITY OF VERY INDIVIDUAL BEINGS! mANY CAN READ NOTES ON PAPER FEW CAN READ THE MUSIC ..

+John e martin III What is this AIDS comment? First, of all lose the caps, it makes you look real dimwitted. Second of all, of course amateurs will find pieces played professionally too fast, because they are amateurs. Also, your comment indicates, through the crossed out part, that the composer does not intend for the piece to be interpreted, sorry if that is not correct but you didn't even use grammar there. However, if so, then you are completely wrong. A composer of course would like to see their work flourish the way they intend for it to be played but because tempo on a music sheet is really just a suggestion. Many compositions get slowed down or even sped up, it's the nature of music. Ravel's music is slightly unconventional to begin with so it's extremely hard to just say, "Yeah, oh yeah, that tempo is definitely 127," that just does not happen. The last part is just so jumbled and random that it makes me question whether English is your first language.

I marvel at the insane fastidiousness with which listeners rate such a performance. If the capacity to enjoy is limited by the ruthlessness of critical consciousness, then the greatest critic will have nearly nothing to enjoy. And if it is enjoyed, it will have been only after all of the hurdles for this idealized, impeccable performance have been leaped. How different we have become from the children, whose easy joy we alternately refer to as innocence and ignorance. There is also a feigned standard of objectivity, calling for emotional qualities in a performance that are as subjective as feelings themselves. Can a piece elicit different feelings in a performer? Of course! Or, for that matter, the same piece yield different reactions in members of an audience. Outside of verifiable blunders and obvious absence of feeling, there are many ways to successfully approach the same piece of music.

@NickNahum ;-)

most comments are positive from what I see, if you can't handle criticism, don't criticise criticism.

Very eloquent but not necessary. Clearly almost nobody that comments about a mistakes or whatever is in the attitude to destroy any and everything, neither they does not enjoy the music itself. BUT provided we have a room here to comment, comments can be done and comments we do and that is it. I do not see almost never "insane fastidiousness", but, ok, yours is a acceptable comment too

Edmund Smith they ain't very good Buddhists them folks who bar themselves from this exceptional moment or even unexceptional moments chosing instead to pay attention to that god awful racket in ones head.

Well said! Few people know how to criticize correctly. That's why they are on a Youtube comment thread and not in the New Yorker... A lot of bitter and envious folks out there.

you can get a fairly accurate idea of what Ravel intended if you listen to Perlemuter. I think she's a tremendously gifted pianist but the rubato for me banalizes the menuet. An example of a daring performance of this same piece would be Thibaudet. He takes it very very slow but it never becomes vulgar or overtly sentimental...

@Steven Jolly - Thibaudet is one of the most boring professional players out there. His playing of these pieces is as about as bland and nondescript as one can get. You can't really tell much from Perlmutter because he was SO OLD when he recorded these pieces, that his playing obviously suffers from technical limitations he most likely did not have when he was younger. The transcribed and published interview Morhange did with him on Radio France offers more information than his recordings.

No complaints or quibbles. This is superb to take in. She's a straight-up wonder at the piano, so enjoyable to watch as well as to listen to.

the menuet is played with  too much rubato, a pity...this was certainly not what Ravel intended

not sure how you know what Ravel intended, but plse enlighten me ^^ I also agree that so much rubato is not what I think is most suited for the menuet, but I like the balls she has to do so ;) it's more interesting than annoying to me

@Matthijs Bekaert Ravel almost always loathed excessive timetaking and rubato - "play my music, don't interpret!" he used to say. If you look at the footnotes by Nancy Bricard in the Alfred edition she suggests that one takes no time at all in going into the Musette section

@Steven Jolly - I think you're all crazy. Ravel never intended to have his music played like a sewing machine. He said so to Vlado Perlmutter, and in a series of interviews Perlmutter did on Radio France (later transcribed and published as "Ravel d'aprés Ravel"), he said that Ravel said it should breathe. And except for one place in this performance of the minuet, that's all Hewitt is doing and all in very good taste.

Ravel tended to be quite specific about his markings for expression. Of course all music (unless specified otherwise) must have room to breathe. But in homage to the Baroque aesthetic here, expression should remain restrained. Angela is brilliant, but sometimes choses whether or not to follow his wishes, such as his clear direction that all mordants and trills occur on the beat, not before. It's still a a beautiful rendition, done with clarity and care.

Eblouisant final avec une clarté de jeu exceptionnel !

Trés beau délié des doigts. Un phrasé élégant. Une dynamique de charme. C´est vraiment une belle interprétation qu´on aime ré-écouter. Bravo!.

Sounds like she can't wait to get to the end.. maybe she needs the bathroom.. :0)

Just her interpretation - overall a nice performance, I think.

Love it! Best performance of this I think I've heard! This woman is terrific at her art. I love watching her facial expressions... she's so into it:-)

Such a beautiful song and her skill and performance does the work proud