Ibert, Trois pièces brèves (3rd movement)

Writing this series of performance picks gives me the chance to wade through a lot of music. I hope to draw you into that discovery process by showing you some of what I’ve discovered over the years. It’s a continuing process. None of us will ever exhaust the supply of good music. So if you are already engaged in your own exploration of the repertoire, maybe you should tell me what you’ve found.

I often feature works that I know very well. Other times, the post involves things that I sort of know, things that I ought to know but somehow neglected, and things that I never would have found if I didn’t need something new and interesting for this series.

When I started this series almost two years ago, I featured Six Bagatelles by György Ligeti. I knew the composer reasonably well, but not the piece. But I was also very impressed with the performers, the wind quintet Carion. So for today, I went to see where else they might lead me, and found this short piece by Jacques Ibert (1890-1962). I have had a passing familiarity with Ibert and generally lumped him in with the French Impressionists. But I did not know his Trois pièces brèves. It confirms for me this statement of his biographer, Alexandra Laederich:

His music can be festive and gay … lyrical and inspired, or descriptive and evocative … often tinged with gentle humour…[A]ll the elements of his musical language bar that of harmony relate closely to the Classical tradition.

A 20th-century French composer with a musical language rooted in Classical tradition reminds me of Ravel. And it tells me maybe I should spend some more time with Ibert’s music.