Piano Concerto in G Major

Ravel was seven years old when he had his first piano lessons—and when he turned his hand to composition in his early teens, piano was the instrument he wrote for. He would later study piano at the Paris Conservatory, and so it was perhaps only a matter of time before he wrote a concerto for piano. As early as 1906, in his early 30s, he started drafting a concerto on Basque themes, one that he returned to briefly before the First World War intervened. It was not until 1929 that Ravel returned to his material, reworking some of it for the Piano Concerto in G. In the first movement, we hear the influence of jazz and a reference to Gershwin. But Ravel also set out to recreate the spirit of Mozart and Saint-Saëns—the second movement was directly inspired by the "Larghetto" from Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet. While writing the G Major work, Ravel took on another commission from Paul Wittgenstein to write the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand. The two works were premiered in January 1932, less than two weeks apart. Ravel had wanted to perform the Piano Concerto in G himself, but his poor health would not allow it—instead, when it came to its first performance, at the Salle Pleyel in Paris, Marguerite Long was the soloist with the Orchestre Lamoureux, Ravel conducting on the podium.