World-class pianist Daniil Trifonov returns to the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra with Maurice Ravel’s multi-facetted piano concerto. A brilliant introduction to an evening of French music in the Grand Hall: under the leadership of Chief Conductor Alan Gilbert, with the Symphonic Sketches of »La mer« after the interval, the programme features one of the most important works by Ravel’s contemporary, Claude Debussy. With this impressionistic masterpiece, the composer created a colourful tone poem about the sea and related moods and recollections. It then continues just as multi-layered with a suite from Ravel’s ballet music »Daphnis et Chloé«. With its wonderful tonal colours, this is one of the most popular works in French music history.
Performers
NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester
Daniil Trifonov piano
conductor Alan Gilbert
Programme
Maurice Ravel
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in G major
– Interval –
Claude Debussy
La mer / Three Symphonic Sketches
Maurice Ravel
Daphnis et Chloé / Fragments symphoniques, deuxième série
About the programme
Daniil Trifonov opens the evening with Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major – a piece of music full of charm and wit, which »is written [entirely] in the spirit of concertos by Mozart and Saint-Saëns«, as the composer himself emphasised. A spirited whip stroke – and it soon goes into the stylistic cosmos of impressionistic sounds, Spanish »exoticism«, jazz harmonies and rhythms as well as dreamy waltz melodies.
Afterwards, the waves froth and the sparks fly even literally in response: »Stormy and changeable like the sea« is his work, said Claude Debussy about the Symphonic Sketches called »La Mer«. The inconstancy, the glistening and vagueness of this liquid element precisely matched his musical aesthetic referred to as »impressionistic«.
The concert then concludes with the piece which Igor Stravinsky no less once described as »one of the most beautiful products of all French music«: Maurice Ravel’s ballet »Daphnis et Chloé«. The work emerged on behalf of the famous impresario Sergei Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes and is based on a pastoral novel by the late-Greek writer Longos. Ravel correspondingly had in mind »an expansive musical fresco entirely dedicated to the Greece of my dreams«. Its Concerto Suite No. 2 brings together the most well-known numbers from the ballet, among them »Lever du jour« (Sunrise) and »Danse générale«.
