Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit is one of those rite-of-passage works that has long proved irresistible to pianists, resulting in hundreds of recordings over the decades. Premiered in 1909 – the year after it was written – by Ricardo Viñes, that tireless advocate of the music of Ravel, Debussy and Satie as well as his fellow Spaniards Falla and Albéniz, the composer was by all accounts underwhelmed, finding his freedom with the score problematic. Yet without Viñes, there may have been no Gaspard, for it was he who introduced Ravel to Aloysius Bertrand’s collection of poems, Gaspard de la nuit.

The Uzbek pianist Behzod Abduraimov now enters the fray with a bold resetting of Gaspard within an album titled ‘Shadows of my Ancestors’ (read the review), in which Ravel is partnered by Prokofiev and his countrywoman Dilorom Saidaminova. This is a bold step: Abduraimov’s first foray into Ravel on record. Had he been quietly working on the piece behind the scenes?

‘Well, this is my second go at Gaspard. I first played it a decade ago, performed it for about a season, and then put it aside until 2023. But that intervening time was very useful, because I was more experienced as a musician. And the fact that I’d played it before made relearning it easier, physically; I think my approach is more sophisticated than previously, but what I didn’t want to lose was the fire of my early twenties.’

Abduraimov finds himself naturally drawn to cycles – whether Chopin’s Preludes, Mussorgsky’s Pictures or Debussy’s Children’s Corner: ‘I enjoy the challenge of short, highly contrasting pieces but within a bigger whole.’ And those contrasts couldn’t be more extreme than in the three pieces that make up Ravel’s Gaspard, as we move from the water nymph Ondine via the dark, obsessive depiction of the gallows in the middle movement to the shape-shifting horror that is Scarbo.

Listening to Abduraimov’s interpretation, I’m repeatedly struck by his fidelity to the score’s markings, while not sounding hemmed in by Ravel’s demands. ‘I think you need to be ready for Gaspard,’ he observes with magnificent understatement. ‘Pianistically speaking it’s like nothing else. When I first heard it, I was mesmerised, and thought how Impressionistic it sounded; but when I opened the score, I realised how precise Ravel was in his markings – and how many there are! For me, interpretation is about first absorbing what the composer puts in the score; then I come second.’

It seems extraordinary, too, to think that this was written in 1908: what Ravel was asking of pianists was nothing less than revolutionary. Abduraimov agrees: ‘That’s exactly the word I’d use – because if you look at something such as the mid-part of “Le gibet” [bar 28], Ravel writes: Sans expression – “No expression”. It’s such a powerful idea, and when you reach that point in a performance it’s as if the ground has vanished from under your feet.’

Ondine

I wonder how much experimentation Abduraimov found himself doing in preparing for the recording – the colours he finds, for instance, within the barely-there dynamics of ‘Ondine’: it would be so much easier to play the treacherous opening just a little louder. ‘It’s about experience, about knowing how far you can go on the piano – and the joy of interpretation is that, no matter how precise the instructions, everyone will play it slightly differently.’

There’s another particularly notable point in ‘Ondine’ that I want to ask Abduraimov about: the passage marked Très lent (from bar 85), where Ravel moves from three staves to a single line and from incessant demisemiquaver movement to something much more measured. ‘Ah yes,’ Abduraimov begins, ‘these bars are so open to question, partly because in the previous bar either you hold down the sustaining pedal or you cut it off before the Très lent. I’m thinking of the character of Ondine [who in the poem attempts to seduce a young man into joining her in her watery palace; when he protests that he has a mortal lover, she laughs derisively before vanishing] – it’s as if she’s thinking, maybe I’ll give that man one more chance. This is her speaking quietly to herself. And then the big surprise that follows, as Ravel moves from pp to ff, Rapide et brillant – the first time you get anywhere near that loud a dynamic in this piece – and again there’s a striking moment just in the final bar, where you might naturally slow down, but Ravel guards against this by putting Sans ralentir – another brilliant example of the innovation of his thinking. This whole page shows the sheer might of Ondine, and the sign-off, in which the left hand sustains, while the right hand’s notes are cut off, is crucial because it means the piece ends with a question mark.’

Le gibet

The more we talk, the clearer Abduraimov’s connection with Bertrand’s poetry becomes. In his recording, he gets ‘Le gibet’ just so in terms of its pacing. ‘It’s so important to keep the momentum going even though it’s very slow. Of course, those tolling bells help that sense of movement. I imagine them emerging from another village – you can hear them but you can’t see what is happening. And then that incredible moment where he writes Sans expression – that’s a point of absolute stillness, where time seems to stop. And while “Le gibet” can’t be too slow, if you take it too fast it becomes almost lightheaded. Like all music, it needs to breathe.’

Are those repeated B flats not only bells but a representation of the corpse swaying in the wind? ‘Absolutely! Again, it’s pure genius the way that Ravel creates a whole piece from that repeated note, but by constantly clothing it in different harmonies, it’s shifting all the time. Almost as if, even within the darkness, there are moments of hope. After all, there are some passages where he writes expressif, but then hope is extinguished, and it ends in total desolation.’

Scarbo

In ‘Scarbo’ Ravel famously quipped that he set out to write something more difficult than Balakirev’s Islamey, but also talked about wanting it to be a ‘caricature of Romanticism’, adding, ‘perhaps it got the better of me’. I wondered what Abduraimov’s stance was on this.

‘Well, Bertrand’s Scarbo is this little fiend who frightens people, who moves very quickly from one place to another and constantly changes his appearance – he’s like something out of a horror movie! I’ve played Islamey, too, and it’s difficult but in a different way. “Scarbo” is extremely technically challenging while always having this sophistication to it. And there’s that Ravellian precision too – you can perhaps very occasionally take liberties with his markings, but only the slightest amount.’

Were there any specific instances? ‘At the beginning, you have that three-note phrase, then a quaver rest: if you take a tiny bit more time over it the effect is scarier – which is what you want. But it’s also about the way it connects to “Le gibet”: when I play it in concert, there are the B flats fading away, and I allow the sustaining pedal to die away so then these three notes of “Scarbo” seem to appear from nowhere – it’s a total switch of gears, but it has to sound seamless, very soft, almost as if the phrase emerges from somewhere underground. The most important thing in Gaspard is how you treat the sound, the double and triple pianos, and all Ravel’s other indications. To me, it’s the sound itself that plays the biggest role.’

But then in ‘Scarbo’ you have the additional difficulty of those wretched repeated notes! Hard enough on a Pleyel, the composer’s favoured piano, but so much more challenging on today’s pianos. ‘Again, this movement is full of Ravel the revolutionary: when I first opened to score to “Scarbo” and saw that passage in seconds towards the end [from bar 460, where it starts accelerating], I thought who writes like this – dissonance on dissonance? But it describes Scarbo so well, this terrifying, disgusting thing. I see an image immediately.’

And how striking they are within a movement that also has those almost Romantic-sounding flourishes, from bar 32 for instance. ‘I agree,’ says Abduraimov. ‘That four-note pattern has, to me, a kind of Eastern flavour. It reminds me of 1001 Nights, and, with its crescendo from mf to ff it’s a big splash of emotion. In my mind’s eye, this is the point in the drama where the grand, theatrical curtains open – we haven’t actually seen Scarbo yet: we glimpse him at bar 52, where Ravel has that detached little rhythm, marked Un peu marqué, but we only finally see his face when that pattern becomes more prevalent at bar 94. That might sound childish …’

Not at all, I assure him, the immediacy with which Abduraimov transfers this image to the piano is potent indeed. So too is his way with the vexacious final page, where we get Ravel’s favourite texture again – shimmering right-hand thirds and sixths played triple piano. ‘I try to imagine the sound I want here and command my hands to obey!’, Abduraimov says. ‘If you think about it too hard, it becomes impossible. And in those final bars – Sans ralentir – Scarbo disappears, but instead of a question mark as you have at the end of “Ondine”, here there’s a definite menacing “I’ll be back”. The devil will have the last word. It’s just genius!’

This interview originally appeared in the January 2024 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue of the world's leading classical music magazine – subscribe today