Fin de Siècle
Location: Poole
Date: 30-01-2013
Time: 19:30
Venue Details: Lighthouse
Works Performed
- Ravel : Le Tombeau de Couperin
- Poulenc : Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra
- Rimsky-Korsakov : Scheherazade
Performers
- Conductor : Shuntaro Sato
- Soloist: Frank Braley (Piano)
- Soloist: Eric Le Sage (Piano)
Perhaps one of Ravel’s most personal creations, Le Tombeau de Couperin is a memorial to friends of his who had fallen in the First World War. It was the nearest he came to producing a nationalist or patriotic statement in his music. Although the work rings with 20th-century harmonies bursting with colour and inventiveness, Ravel manages to retain the stunning clarity and rhythmic liveliness of its Baroque forebears.
Poulenc's witty work is full of many different influences: Mozart, the concerto grosso, jazz, silent film music, French music hall music, and even Balinese gamelan. It is a mix of aristocratic elegance and gleeful hellraising, full to the brim with saucy melodies and unbridled exuberance, but never lapsing into complete vulgarity or mawkish sentimentality. The parody of Mozart slow movements is genius. This enduring and endearing concerto is pure Poulenc, irreverent yet sensitive.
To find out more about Poulenc's Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra, you can Meet the Music
Scheherazade consisted of “separate, unconnected episodes and pictures,” as Rimsky-Korsakov himself put it, from The Arabian Nights: snapshots, in other words, of a world he never knew. It is a triumph of imagination over experience; a feast of sumptuous colours and brilliant instrumental effect by the man who literally wrote the book on orchestration. It quickly became a favourite Romantic showpiece and a landmark in the history of descriptive music.
Pre-Concert Talk: 6.20 - 6.50pm
Free to all ticket-holders. Find out more here.
