That's assuming that Ravel wanted the orchestral bass line to dominate. Here is Figure 36 in Ravel's piano transcription (after the double bar):



In the orchestral version (which can be downloaded for free at http://www.imslp.org/wiki/Valse%2C_La_%28Ravel%2C_Maurice%29 ), the bass line (from the second bar after Fig. 36) is played by clarinets, bass clarinets, violas and cellos, joined in the seventh bar after Fig. 36 by oboes and second violins. The bass trombone, tuba and double basses add punctuation. The chords, on the other hand, are played by violins and full brass - horns, trumpets and trombones, which is obviously going to produce a more prominent sound. Ravel knew what he was doing orchestrally, he could easily have used only a subset of the brass to balance the lines more. But much of the piece, at least as I hear it, makes use of a certain unusual relationships between parts (some deliberately top-heavy and overblown), which adds to its grotesque quality (he cited approvingly the fact that some critics 'situate this dance in Paris, on a volcano, about 1870, others, in Vienna, before a buffet, in 1919'). The balance changes in lots of directions; I reckon if Ravel had wanted this section to be bass-dominated, he would have modified the orchestration. By the eighth bar of Fig. 38, in the orchestral version, the lines fuse into this terrifying build up of chords in the whole orchestra (all strings, flutes, horns and trumpets playing triplet repeated groups, the rest of the orchestra backing these with chords on the crotchets). Ravel's piano equivalent of this is a very poor substitute (indeed this is true of many of the long crescendos in the work, let alone the climax). A fair amount of his other orchestral music was originally written for piano (though even there I sometimes detect orchestral thinking, see the example below from the Valses Nobles et Sentimentales for example), but La Valse seems as thoroughly conceived in orchestral terms as anything he wrote. The piano version was (according to Roy Howat) only really conceived for domestic use or ballet rehearsals.

Or he could, for example, have marked the bass line f with a crescendo to ff and the chords fp and mf if he'd wanted the chords less prominent than the bass line.

Oh look, indeed he did. Both at 36 and at 63.

I think you'll find the bassoons and contra are also on the bass line. In other words everything he could throw on it, if you assume he didn't regard the tuba as capable of playing it cleanly.

Yes, well that's obviously your point of view and you're quite entitled to it. Personally I don't regard it as supported by the score but there we are. I look forward to your performance.

21st century anyone?

Well, I don't see how that applies at the big climax at Fig. 95, with those ominous crescendos on sustained notes in the central register that engulf the melody (in the piano version, all he can do is a rather pathetic upwards arpeggio as a substitute). More a case, throughout that piece, of a somewhat detached and ironised perspective on Wagnerian orchestration. The shrieking high chromatic lines would sound merely brilliant on the piano, and the ascending string figurations in chords merely clumsy (as they do in the transcription - some of the pitches he simply notates with small noteheads, indicating their impracticality) without doing so in a meaningful way. The piece contains one of the most brilliant and wholly individual pieces of orchestration I know of. There is an aesthetic of orchestral clarity (in terms of individual parts), inherited from Stravinsky and which has been hugely influential through the 20th century and into the 21st, which is often applied to Ravel's music; to my ears it rather obliterates the romantic element (sometimes more murky, brooding, etc.) which co-exists with his more detached sensibility. There's still a lot of potential in that approach to the medium.

If you're just trying to bait, I'm not biting. Do you think a Stravinskian aesthetic of orchestral writing (in terms of its broad essentials) provides the best model for the 21st century? It took me a while to come to terms with James Dillon's writing for orchestra, which uses a certain blurring of textures and so on as an expressive device (parts half-submerged and so on), now I realise I was listening to it too much from a post-Stravinskian viewpoint. With Dusapin's orchestral music, on the other hand, I often feel the 'blended' approach is taken too far and some more individuation of lines in performance would help lift the writing from what can become rather homogenous.

Well, I hear that sensibility at play in the orchestral music of Boulez, Stockhausen, Carter, Lachenmann, Donatoni, Birtwistle, Knussen, Ades, and countless others. There are major exceptions, of course - Xenakis to an extent, Scelsi, Sciarrino, Dillon, for example, but the Stravinskian approach (most of all in terms of clear delineation of parts, and relatively clear and distinct colouration) seems dominant. It seems to have rubbed off on players as well, when they complain about whether a particular line can be 'heard' individually or not.

Mostly because Stravinsky was the pioneer of such an approach with a large orchestra.


The key word omitted is 'individually'. Sometimes individual lines cannot be heard, but the total effect of their combination would be quite different without them. Was it Richard Strauss who, when challenged in this manner, said something about how he couldn't necessarily hear that particular part, but he would be able to hear if it wasn't there?