Alborada del gracioso confirms a very specific artistic approach in the composition of MAURICE RAVEL. With the aspirations and self-confidence of a true keyboard talent, he has left remarkable opuses and enriched the keyboard writing. In fact, it was his Concerto in G-Major that brought Marguerite Long to fame. In this context, it became common for Ravel to create both piano and orchestral versions of his musical ideas that were equally repertoire driven – Le Tombeau de Couperin (The Grave of Couperin), Valses nobles et sentimentales, Ma mère l’Oye (My Mother Goose), Gypsy. “The Waltz”, for example, remarkable for its orchestration, was first performed for two pianos. The definition of transcription does not apply in such cases for Ravel, for he was not concerned with a simple substitution of timbre, but with the re-composition of the musical idea into a new sonic idiom. This also applies to the piece Alborada del gracioso, originally written for piano as the fourth movement in the five-movement work Miroirs (‘Mirrors’), which embodies the composer’s vision of reality. The piece was written in 1905 for piano, and was performed at the Salle Érard on January 6th,  1906. The version for orchestra dates from 1918 and was premiered in Paris on 17 May 1919 by the Orchestre Pasdelou with Rhené-Baton conducting.

Alborada del gracioso can be translated as “The Morning Song of the Jester”, where Alba (“light of dawn”) is a Provençal morning strophic song; in Spanish tradition it denotes any music performed at dawn, at festivals, in someone’s honour or at a wedding. To his Alborada Ravel adds del gracioso (or “of the clown, of the Jester”), which is a typical image in the classical Spanish comedy of Calderón or Lope de Vega.

Each of the five parts is dedicated to a friend of Ravel. Of these, Ravel initially orchestrated only the third movement, Une Barque sur l’océan” (A Barque on the Ocean), which was performed by the Orchestre Colonne in 1907, and then the fourth, Alborada del gracioso. Later the remaining movements were orchestrated by other musicians, Percy Grainger, Ernesto Halffter, Felix Guenter and Michael Round. The piece Alborada del gracioso is dedicated to Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi, a critic and musicologist whose assistance in the composer’s early years was very substantial.