Performed by Modi Deng at the 2017 Wallace National Piano Competition.
Undine by John William Waterhouse Photo: Public Domain
Maurice Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit is notorious as being one of the most challenging works in the entire piano repertoire.
Ravel based it on three of the prose poems from the collection Gaspard de la Nuit – Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot by Aloysius Bertrand.
The three movements are:
1. Ondine - the water nymph sings and lures her victim to her realm at the bottom of the lake.
2. Le Gibet - in a desert, a corpse hangs from a gibbet while a bell tolls from a far off city.
3. Scarbo - the nighttime antics of a mischievous, possibly evil, goblin.
Recorded by RNZ Concert, University of Auckland Music Theatre, July 2017
Producer & engineer: Tim Dodd
