NOSPR / Lionel Bringuier / Benjamin Schmid - NOSPR

The French developed their own special take on symphonic music. They approached strict forms with reserve and explored the remarkable timbral possibilities offered by an orchestra. The Valses nobles et sentimentales express Ravel’s fascination with Schubert’s arrangements of Viennese dances, but this is a thoroughly twentieth-century pastiche, developed a decade later in La valse, a somewhat ironical epitaph for the old world. Not without reason did the composer’s contemporaries associate the familiar shapes emerging from splashes of colour with impressionist painting. That is also the tradition that begat Henri Dutilleux’s L’arbre des songes, half a century later: a violin concerto that thrusts upwards and expands like a great plant. Meanwhile, Roussel’s bravura Third Symphony, from the 1930s, gives us a classical structure and emotional contrasts: echoes of romanticism with an equally French fascination with modernity in the background.

[Adam Suprynowicz, translated by John Comber]

Duration of the concert (including break): approx. 100 minutes