Alborada del gracioso

Alborada del gracioso (The Jester's Aubade) is the fourth of the five movements of Maurice Ravel's piano suite Miroirs, written in 1905. It is about seven minutes long and, as part of the suite, has always been regularly played and recorded by pianists. Alborada was orchestrated by Ravel fourteen years later for use as a ballet. In this form, as a standalone orchestral piece, it is often played in concert.

Title
The Spanish title has no exact translation. Alborada, or dawn in English, has various musical meanings: a song for a wedding day; a folk dance; a Galician folk tune; and a type of rhythmically free music played on bagpipes and drum. But as usually construed for Ravel's piece it is an announcement of dawn, a sunrise song, an aubade. Gracioso has roots in the troubadour and trouvère traditions: he was a figure of Spanish comedy, the genial buffoon, the grotesque lover, an amusingly entertaining person, a servant who comments on the actions of his superiors. Accordingly the whole title is rendered variously as Morning Song of the Clown, Morning Song of the Buffoon or The Jester's Aubade.

Background
In the years 1904–05, as he was finishing his String Quartet, Ravel composed Miroirs (Mirrors), a suite of five short piano pieces. He later orchestrated two of them: the orchestral version of "Une Barque sur l'océan" (A Barque on the Ocean) came out in 1906; more than a decade elapsed before Ravel orchestrated the other, the "Alborado del gracioso".

The orchestration came about at the invitation of Sergei Diaghilev, the impresario of the Ballets Russes. He was well acquainted with Ravel, having commissioned from him the music for Daphnis et Chloé in 1909. Diaghilev visited Spain for the first time in 1916 and was so taken with the country that he commissioned several ballets on Spanish themes. The first appeared in the same year: Leonid Massine's Las meninas, inspired by Velázquez's painting of the same name. It was danced to a composite score that included "Alborada del gracioso" (in its piano version) along with Gabriel Fauré's Pavane and pieces by Louis Aubert and Emmanuel Chabrier. Diaghilev commissioned Ravel to orchestrate the Alborada (and the Chabrier piece, the Menuet pompeux) for a production of the ballet, retitled Les jardins d'Aranjuez, at the Alhambra Theatre, London in 1919. Before the ballet opened in London the orchestral Alborada was premiered in Paris on 17 May 1919 by the Pasdeloup Orchestra conducted by Rhené-Baton.

Music
The music consists of two sections of lively dance music, separated by a rhapsodic, extended song. The opening is marked assez vif (fairly quick), ♩ = 92. Like the piano original, the piece begins with imitations of guitar music. In the orchestral version they are produced by the first harp, played close to the sound board, along with precisely arranged pizzicato violins and violas. The basic metre of the opening section is but Ravel varies it with occasional bars of  and.

The music is mainly quiet for the first 28 bars as the themes are established. They are then brought together in what the commentator Eric Bromberger describes as "a great explosion of sound, subtly tinted by Ravel's use of castanets, tambourine, cymbals and harp". and then a fortissimo chord introduces the central episode, a plaintive melody for solo bassoon – the clown's song – alternating with shimmering string sonorities. To represent the sounds of the extreme treble of the piano original, the accompaniment to the bassoon melody is scored for 24-part strings, some instruments bowed, others plucked, and deploying a range of harmonics, multiple stops and sul tasto effects.

The music makes a gradual return to the original tempo; Ravel added four bars to the original score here, making use of woodwind tremolos. The piece builds to a conclusion and ends in what critics have variously described as "a blaze of orchestral color", "an exhilarating climax", and "a grand and glorious racket".

Recordings
The first recording of the orchestral Alborada del gracioso was made by the Berlin State Opera Orchestra, conducted by Otto Klemperer in 1926. Since then there have been numerous versions on record. In a comparative survey of recordings for BBC Radio 3, Rob Cowan short-listed the following:

Recordings recommended by other critics include:

In 2015 the conductor François-Xavier Roth and the orchestra Les Siècles, which specialises in historically informed performance, released a recording of the Alborada  using original or reproduction instruments of the period.