Through the gate

The last section of Ravel's Ma mére l'oye (Mother Goose – it is also at the end of the suite) is 'Le jardin féerique', the fairy garden.

This finale is built on strange, quasi-archaic contrapuntal lines, which have a sort of hieratic grandeur in the way they don't match neatly. About halfway through, everything evaporates up into little, high sounds that gradually fan out and down, filling the orchestral range again; and then the saddest, loveliest passage goes by – the treble falling and the bass rising; then the whole builds to a big, noisy conclusion.

Before that last trite cadence, those two lines crossing against each other: they have the sense of a vast door opening into another world... I have a piano transcription of the suite, and playing those bars in the middle of the last page of the score is always an incredibly mysterious, beautiful experience.

As though something incredible is waiting for us, just on the other side of – ...