Stirred by Ravel

It’s rare that both of Ravel’s operas appear in one programme, indeed that they appear at all. The RCM, as one might expect, did the fullest justice to both of them, and made clear how immeasurably superior the second, L’enfant et les sortilèges, is to the first, L’heure espagnole. L’heure is entirely a comedy of situation, with a libidinous woman coping with an embarrassing superfluity of importunate lovers by having a muleteer carry them upstairs and down in grandfather clocks, until she realises, with her husband’s acquiescence, that it’s the dumb muleteer himself who is the goods.

The music is often merely illustrative, and reveals too fully Ravel’s fascination with machinery. The singers are instructed in the score to speak rather than sing, but so far as I know that is never done. With a central character as lovely of voice as Pumeza Matshikiza (do try to remember that name; I have been trying for two years) one is grateful for the disobedience. Her acting and presence are just as striking, too, and she has shown in three widely differing roles what a versatile artist she is. Without her the 50 minutes of L’heure would have seemed very long, for the point of the joke must drop immediately with any spectator, and with Ravel’s invention at so low an ebb there is little to concentrate on. The production was smart and as witty as the piece permits, the menfolk adequately absurd in their various ways, and as always Michael Rosewell proved an ideal accompanist.

But after the interval magic descended with a quite marvellous L’enfant, as beautiful and inventive to look at as to hear, and at the end stirring, as Ravel almost never is; the final chorus in praise of the child who has learned the lesson of compassion seeming to be situated between Fauré and Vaughan Williams (a Ravel pupil).