Miraculous and Magical - Season Finale
Featured as part of the Classic Series
Friday May 15, 2009 8:00PM
Saturday May 16, 2009 8:00PM
Saturday May 16, 2009 8:00PM
The Toledo Museum of Art Peristyle
Learn more about this venue
Learn more about this venue
Description:
"You know my intense attraction to these wonderful (waltz) rhythms and that I value the joie de vivre expressed in the dance much more deeply than Franckist puritanism."
- Maurice Ravel
- Maurice Ravel
Guest conductor Larry Rachleff makes his much-anticipated return to Toledo in a kaleidoscopic program that shows the orchestra’s incomparable ability to evoke time and place.
Our sixty-fifth birthday season closes with two works originally conceived for the ballet stage. Maurice Ravel’s choreographic poem, La Valse was inspired by the rhythms of late-nineteenth-century Vienna. Infused with Romantic fervor and orchestrational brilliance, Ravel ultimately traces nothing less than the birth, flourishing and decay of an entire artistic movement. Béla Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin uses the various resources of the orchestra to depict, at various times, a concrete jungle, a seductive dancer, the greed of three tramps, and the magical powers of a lust-crazed Mandarin.
Points of interest:
· Larry Rachleff appeared with the Toledo Symphony at the end of the 2002-03 season, and was immensely popular with both audience and orchestra. That program was highlighted by another ballet suite from Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird.
· Ralph Vaughan Williams and Joseph Canteloube shared interest in folk music as well as medieval and Renaissance music. Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis corresponds strongly to the viol fantasy form of the Elizabethan era, and he uses a modal language commonly found in folk music of the time period. Canteloube’s Songs of the Auvergne, featuring Susan Lorette Dunn, highlights the music from Canteloube’s home region. Many of these songs have their roots in medieval troubadour music.
· Vaughan Williams, just prior to his composition of the Fantasia, was taking lessons on orchestration from a young French composer by the name of Maurice Ravel.
· Maurice Ravel and Sergei Diaghilev intended to create a ballet based on the concept of waltz rhythms. However, Diaghilev rejected the concept of La Valse, leading to a rift between the two men that was never healed.
Program:
Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis 15'
Bartók Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin* 22'
INTERMISSION
Canteloube Songs of the Auvergne* 17'
Ravel La valse, poème choréographique 12'
* TSO Premiere