HECTOR BERLIOZ: Harold en Italia, Op.16, Symphony for viola and orchestra
MAURICE RAVEL: La valse, choreographic poem for orchestra
MAURICE RAVEL: Daphnis et Chloé, Suites 1 and 2
Viola: Lise Berthaud
Conductor: Michel Plasson
Program notes
The presence on the podium of our honorary conductor, Michel Plasson, will be one of the highlights of the season. The Gallic maestro, who will be ninety-two years old in October, will conduct a programme très français, a repertoire in which our orchestra has developed under his guidance and that of its last chief conductor, Marc Soustrot.
Concertante music for viola is a treasure to be discovered, among the gems of the repertoire this Harold in Italy, somewhere between symphony and programme music, to be performed by the virtuoso French violist Lise Berthaud. Commissioned by Berlioz to be performed on his 1731 Stradivarius viola, it seems that it was not to the il diavolo's liking (‘I am silent for too long’), although in his maturity he regretted not having premiered it. Berlioz wanted to create evocative impressions in the manner of Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimages, the poem that encouraged the English Romantics' wanderlust and their "Grand Tour.
And from Berlioz to one of his most illustrious heirs, Maurice Ravel. The two pieces on the programme are the fruit of his meeting with the brilliant impresario of Russian ballets, Sergei Diaghílev. Daphnis and Chloe was premiered in 1912. The recreation of ancient Greece takes on a lush, chromatic texture in Ravel's score. Post-Great War is ‘La valse’, an evocation of the old order, in which Diaghílev did not find the waltz he was looking for but ‘the portrait of a waltz’, because of its elegiac melancholy.
José María Jurado García-Posada