{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Impressions in Blue: Ravel & Gershwin","description":"In the mid-1920s, Maurice Ravel wrote a letter to the legendary composition teacher Nadia Boulanger. Boulanger\u2019s class was a mecca for composers, both young and old, and musicians from all over the world vied to study with her. But Ravel\u2019s letter wasn\u2019t on his own behalf. Instead, he urged Boulanger to take on a young student whom Ravel himself had declined to teach. He wrote: "There is a musician here endowed with the most brilliant, most enchanting, and perhaps the most profound talent: George Gershwin. His worldwide success no longer satisfies him, for he is aiming higher. He knows that he lacks the technical means to achieve his goal. In teaching him those means, one might ruin his talent. Would you have the courage, which I wouldn\u2019t dare have, to undertake this awesome responsibility?" Boulanger also declined to take Gershwin as a student, fearing, like Ravel, that she might damage his spontaneity and dynamic jazz sensibility. Whether or not the famous story is true (that Ravel turned down Gershwin\u2019s request to study with him by saying, \u201cWhy be a second-rate Ravel when you are a first-rate Gershwin?\u201d) we may never know. But the two composers were friendly, and formed something of a mutual admiration society. Today, in this fourth collaboration with G. Henle Publishers in honor of their Ravel and Friends project, we\u2019re going to explore the connections between these two great composers: their friendship, their mutual influence, and the profound ways jazz infused itself into Ravel\u2019s music, particularly in his Violin Sonata and Piano Concerto in G. From the moment he discovered it, Ravel adored jazz, and like many French composers of the time, allowed its influence to permeate his work in ways both explicit and subtle. Join us!   ","author_name":"Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast","author_url":"http:\/\/stickynotespodcast.libsyn.com\/","html":"