ChromaDuo shares uncommonly beautiful music with audiences throughout the world. For the past 15 years, Tracy Anne Smith and Rob MacDonald have given concerts across Canada and the United States, as well as in Mexico, England and Germany.

Passionate advocates for their art form, their deep creative connection allows audiences to immerse themselves fully into the music. They are the dedicatees of works by top composers, including Cuban legend Leo Brouwer, Brazilian guitar duo icon Sérgio Assad, French classical-jazz virtuoso Roland Dyens, British iconoclast Stephen Goss, Canadian  composers  Dale Kavanagh and Amy Brandon, and musical polyglot Dušan Bogdanović.

Smith and MacDonald have performed, taught and adjudicated competitions at major festivals of the guitar world including the Guitar Foundation of America (GFA), Boston’s Festival 21, the Iserlohn International Guitar Festival and Festival Internacional de Guitarra Sinaloa, Culiacán.

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Photo: © Bo Huang Photography

Claude Debussy has exercised widespread influence over later generations of composers, both in his native France and elsewhere. He was trained at the Paris Conservatoire, and decided there on a career as a composer rather than as a pianist (his original intention). His highly characteristic musical language, thoroughly French in inspiration, extended the contemporary limits of harmony and form, and he had a remarkably delicate command of nuance, whether in piano writing or in the handling of a relatively large orchestra.

Operas

Debussy attempted many operas, two based on stories by Edgar Allan Poe, but he completed only one: Pelléas et Mélisande, a version of the medieval play by Maurice Maeterlinck, with its story of idealised love perfectly matched by the composer’s musical idiom.

Orchestral Music

The most influential piece of orchestral music by Debussy is the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (‘Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun’), based on a poem by Mallarmé. This was later used for a ballet, with choreography by Nijinsky, who created a considerable scandal at the first performance. The music evokes a pagan world, as the satyr of the title takes his ease in the afternoon shade on a summer day.

The three symphonic sketches that constitute La Mer (‘The Sea’), published with a famous woodcut known as The Wave (from the Japanese artist Hokusai’s views of Mount Fuji—an indication of oriental influence on Debussy), offer evocations of the sea from dawn to midday, of the waves, and of the dialogue of wind and sea. Other orchestral works by Debussy include Nocturnes, made up of three sections: Nuages (‘Clouds’), Fêtes (‘Festivals’) and Sirènes. Images, a work in three movements completed in 1912, includes Gigues, Ibéria and Ronde de printemps, the last a celebration of spring. His Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, finally scored by André Caplet, was in origin a theatrical and choreographic collaboration with Gabriele d’Annunzio.

Debussy sketched out orchestration for his Rapsodie for saxophone and piano, completed after his death by Roger-Ducasse, an interesting addition to the repertoire of an instrument often neglected by classical composers.

Chamber Music

Debussy’s chamber music includes a fine string quartet, known as the first, although the second, like so much of the composer’s work, existed only as a future project. He wrote his Rapsodie for saxophone (later orchestrated) somewhat reluctantly, while Syrinx, for unaccompanied flute, in which the pagan god Pan plays his flute, was originally written as incidental music for the theatre. Towards the end of his life Debussy planned a series of six chamber works, patriotically announced as by “Claude Debussy, musicien français”. He completed three of these projected works: a violin sonata, a cello sonata and a sonata for flute, viola and harp.

Vocal Music

Debussy made a significant addition to the French song repertoire, capturing the spirit, in particular, of the work of poets like Verlaine and Mallarmé, but also turning to earlier poets, including Villon and Charles d’Orléans. His Chansons de Bilitis, settings of verses by Pierre Louÿs, turn again to the pagan world, while the settings of the Verlaine Fêtes galantes, including Clair de lune, capture the nostalgia of the poems, their yearning for an unattainable past. His cantata Le Printemps was his submission for the Prix de Rome.

Piano Music

In his writing for the piano Debussy proved himself a successor to Chopin, who had died in Paris 13 years before Debussy’s birth. His own debt to Chopin was overtly expressed in his two books of Études (‘Studies’), completed in 1915. The Deux Arabesques, early works, enjoy continued popularity, as does the Suite bergamasque, with its all too popular ‘Clair de lune’. Estampes (‘Prints’) evokes the Far East in ‘Pagodes’, Spain in ‘La Soirée dans Grenade’ (‘Evening in Granada’), and autumnal sadness in ‘Jardins sous la pluie’ (‘Gardens in the Rain’), while L’Isle joyeuse turns to Watteau for inspiration. Two sets of Images offer further delicate pictures, while the two books of Préludes offer still more varied images, from La Fille aux cheveux de lin (‘The Girl with Flaxen Hair’) and La Cathédrale engloutie (‘The Submerged Cathedral’) to the final Feux d’artifice (‘Fireworks’). The single La Plus que lente (‘More than Slow’) of 1910 and the light-hearted Children’s Corner Suite form a further part of a larger series of works.

French, of paternal Swiss and maternal Basque descent, Ravel combined skill in orchestration with meticulous technical command of harmonic resources, writing in an attractive musical idiom that was entirely his own in spite of contemporary comparisons with Debussy, a composer his senior by some 20 years.

Stage Works

Operas

Ravel wrote two operas. The first, L’heure espagnole (‘The Spanish Clock’), is described as a comédie musicale; the second, with a libretto by Colette, is the imaginative L’Enfant et les sortilèges (‘The Child and the Enchantments’), in which the naughty child is punished when furniture and animals assume personalities of their own.

Ballets

Ravel wrote his ballet Daphnis et Chloé in response to a commission from the Russian impresario Diaghilev. The work, described as a symphonie choréographique, is based on the Hellenistic pastoral novel of Longus. Ma Mère l’oye (‘Mother Goose’), originally for piano duet, was orchestrated and used for a ballet, as were the Valses nobles et sentimentales and the choreographic poem La Valse. Ravel’s last ballet score was the famous Boléro, a work he himself described as an orchestrated crescendo.

Orchestral Music

In addition to the scores for ballet and arrangements of piano works for the same purpose, Ravel wrote an evocative Rapsodie espagnole (‘Spanish Rhapsody’). Other orchestrations of original piano compositions include a version of the very well-known Pavane pour une infante défunte (‘Pavane for a Dead Infanta’), the Menuet antique, Alborada del gracioso from Miroirs, and pieces from Le Tombeau de Couperin. Ravel wrote two piano concertos: the first, completed in 1930, was for the left hand only, commissioned by the pianist Paul Wittgenstein who had lost his right arm in the war; the second, for two hands, was completed in 1931.

Vocal Music

Songs by Ravel include the remarkable Shéhérazade (settings of a text by Tristan Klingsor for mezzo-soprano and orchestra) and the Don Quichotte à Dulcinée (‘Don Quixote to Dulcinea’) songs, originally written for a film about Don Quixote in which the famous Russian bass Chaliapin was to star. Songs with piano include settings of Jules Renard’s Histoires naturelles, portraying its instinctive sympathy with the birds and the cricket. Ravel’s five unsuccessful attempts to win the Prix de Rome are represented by five cantatas, submitted according to the rules of the competition as he chose to interpret them.

Chamber Music

Ravel’s chamber music includes the evocative nostalgia of Introduction and Allegro for harp, flute, clarinet and string quartet, a violin sonata with a jazz-style blues movement, a piano trio, and a string quartet. Tzigane, written for the Hungarian violinist Jelly d’Arányi, is a remarkable excursion into extravagant gypsy style.

Piano Music

Ravel himself was a good pianist. His music for the piano includes compositions in his own nostalgic archaic style, such as the Pavane and the Menuet antique, as well as the more complex textures of pieces such as Jeux d’eau (‘Fountains’), Miroirs and Gaspard de la nuit, with its sinister connotations. The Sonatina is in Ravel’s neoclassical style and Le Tombeau de Couperin is in the form of a Baroque dance suite.