Maurice Ravel's Deux mélodies hébraïques (Two Hebrew Songs), like so many songs by the man, exist in versions for voice and piano and for voice and orchestra, and when you can orchestrate as well as Ravel could, why not? The dates of the piano versions and of the later orchestral versions happen to coincide almost perfectly with the extreme boundaries of World War I: 1914 and 1919, respectively. (For whatever it's worth, Ravel got very little work done during the war years, and so this five-year gap between composition and orchestration might not have been entirely by his choosing.)

Both of the Deux mélodies hébraïques texts are biblical in origin, and Ravel provides both in two different languages—Aramaic and French in the case of the first song, and Yiddish and French in the case of the second.

No. 1, "Kaddisch," has on the surface a very un-Ravellian character. The singer bends and twists through a flashy, ethnically inflected (meaning, of course, Middle Eastern, in a manner sometimes seemingly authentic and sometimes less so), mock-improvised terrain to what is at first just sparse comment from the piano/orchestra. But, listening a little deeper, we realize that only Ravel would have fashioned those octave G naturals, and the sliding voice in between them, in just that way (and few indeed are the composers with courage enough to put the singer out there on a limb all alone for so much of the song!). As the song moves along and the piano begins a rich, harp-like arpeggiated accompaniment, which prompts something a little more song-like from the singer; Ravel as we know him comes rather more to the surface of the music.

No. 2, "L'énigme éternelle" is, by comparison with the ever-changing, gust-and-blow rhythmic quality of the previous song, as stable and steady as it gets. A quietly repeating one-measure cell starts up in the accompaniment at the very beginning of the song and never lets up; but the way Ravel allows this little unit to shift around chromatically is masterful, and it never grows stale. The song, whose dynamic spends most of the time at pianissimo and never grows more robust than piano, is a wonderful example of the kind of tranquil but shimmering musical understatement of which Ravel was so admirably capable.

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