'For a year I dragged Ravel's scores everywhere' - Bart Visman orchestrates 'Ondine'

Dutch composer Bart Visman (b. 1962) has written many wonderful works of his own, but makes his debut with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra with an orchestration of 'Ondine'. This is the first movement from the three-movement piano cycle Gaspard de la nuit by Maurice Ravel. It is the prelude to an integral instrumentation, to be premiered next season. 'I am made of the same stuff as Ravel.'

Ravel made acclaimed instrumentations of piano pieces by himself and others, but never ventured into 'Ondine'. Is that intimidating or rather a fine challenge?

'Intimidating! But also a challenge that I took up enthusiastically. For a year, I dragged Ravel's scores everywhere with me and studied them thoroughly. I may be intimidated but I am not afraid, his music is close to my heart. He speaks to my condition, as the Quakers say. I myself put it this way: I am made of the same stuff.'

'With Ravel's music, we immediately think of the enormous richness of sound. How he undresses and re-dresses a tone makes such an impression that you automatically expect it to be very complex. Therefore, while instrumenting, you quickly tend to do too much.'

'But his approach turned out to be much simpler than I initially assumed. His music is so rich precisely because he works from the core, doing only what is necessary and always choosing the simplest solution in the end. While composing, he heard the orchestral sound with his inner ear and then managed to realise it.'

What made him such a genius orchestrator?

'His orchestral treatment was totally new and definitely not German. Then flutes, clarinets, horns and violins would play the melody, but Ravel did exactly the opposite: there are few doublings. He orchestrated meticulously, thinking from the point of view of balance and exploiting the instruments to their full potential. How loud, how soft, in what register do they play? He found the ideal sound by thinking from colour. Those endless string flageolets, that low celesta, those mysterious noise sounds... Unbelievable!'

How did you proceed yourself?

'I generally also start from a representation of colour. While orchestrating 'Ondine', I initially used the score of Une Barque sur l'Océan kept on hand. That is also about water, but is less complex in every way. Of course, I tried to get as close as possible to Ravel, but he worked from the inside out, as it were, from a microscopic sound representation. I work from the outside in.'

'By the way, there is a good reason why he Gaspard de la nuit never orchestrated it himself. To pianist Vlado Perlemuter, with whom he has worked closely, he said, "The idea behind this piece is that it sounds like the piano version of an orchestral work." And frankly, there are passages that simply sound best on piano.'

'Take the opening, for example. That is very soft and consists of a range of bubbles, foams, waves, tinkles... At the time, that was a very new way of doing piano. It has a fast internal movement, but the tempo is nevertheless low, I had to find an orchestral solution for that. - That was quite a struggle.' 

How did you fix it?

'I briefly thought about including a piano in the orchestra, but that turned out not to be a good idea after all. In his own orchestrations, Ravel uses many natural flageolets, but that's not possible in the key of C-sharp major. In it, there is only one natural flageolet, which produces a flautando effect. Still, transposing was not an option because, of course, Ravel chose his key for a reason.'

'In the end, I opted for movement in the strings and reclining chords from some horns. The poem in the score is about a water nymph, so it just had to be a flute blowing the melody over that mysterious murmur.'

'I see the misty atmosphere as billions of water particles reflecting the whole world. The funny thing is: with the impressionism of Ravel and Debussy, we always think of fog, haze, mist, but it is actually composed with enormous precision and detail. Anything but hazy, in other words.'

How much Ravel and how much Visman will we soon hear in your piece?

'I hope one hundred per cent Ravel, zero per cent Visman, but that is impossible. It's not my play, I borrowed it and hope to return it intact, in new clothes.'