Brussels Philharmonic | Surround XL

Surround XL

programme notes

text by AURÉLIE WALSCHAERT

Maurice Ravel Boléro
Béla Bartók
Rhapsody No. 2, BB 96b: I. Lassu II. Friss
George Gershwin
An American in Paris
Francis Poulenc
Les Biches: Suite, FP 36b: I. Rondeau V. Final

hosted by Bent Van Looy and Ella Michiels

[all programme notes]

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22.02.2025 SINT-ELISABETHKERK KORTRIJK
22.02.2025 SINT-ELISABETHKERK KORTRIJK
22.02.2025 SINT-ELISABETHKERK KORTRIJK
23.02.2025 STUDIO MANHATTAN LEUVEN
23.02.2025 STUDIO MANHATTAN LEUVEN
28.02.2025 TOUR & TAXIS BRUSSELS
28.02.2025 TOUR & TAXIS BRUSSELS
01.03.2025 TOUR & TAXIS BRUSSELS
01.03.2025 TOUR & TAXIS BRUSSELS

Maurice Ravel • Boléro

The ecstatic power of repetition

In the early 20th century, Russian Ida Rubinstein was one of the most influential ballet dancers. As a member of the 'Ballets Russes', she played a key role in producing new dance shows. For the accompanying music, she turned to the foremost composers of her time, such as Maurice Ravel (1875-1937). Rubinstein initially commissioned a reworking of Isaac Albéniz’s piano works from Iberia. However, discovering that these pieces had already been arranged by the Spaniard Enrique Arbós, and were subject to strict copyright laws, Ravel decided to take a different approach. He composed an entirely new piece based on the Spanish dance 'bolero', demonstrating his deep love and mastery in reinventing existing dance movements.

After a successful launch in Europe, the piece had a highly controversial premiere in America in 1929. A disagreement over the tempo between Ravel and conductor Arturo Toscanini turned the work into a 'cause célèbre'. The scandal only enhanced the work’s success. What makes the composition unique is its repetitive ostinato rhythm, consistently played in the snare drums throughout the piece, and subsequently taken up by various instruments. Initially, the two main melodies (AABB) feature in different solo instruments, but gradually they are taken up by various groups of instruments. The volume builds until the entire orchestra resounds in an ecstatic fortissimo. Contrary to Ravel's own prediction that 'Bolero' would be a flop, the audience was captivated from start to finish.

Béla Bartók • Rhapsody No. 2

Folk melodies reimagined

Béla Bartók (1881-1945) explored alternative musical paths in order to breathe new life into twentieth-century art music. He found inspiration in the folk music of his native Hungary, and reworked these into new compositions. Over the years, he expanded the range of his interests to Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and Algeria. His findings had a significant influence on his compositions: they were a source of inspiration for him in terms of melodies, tonality, rhythm and structure. That can be clearly heard in his two Rhapsodies for violin and piano, written in 1928.

Bartók wrote the first rhapsody for his friend the violinist Joseph Szigeti. For this work, he drew chiefly on folk melodies form central Romania and Hungary. For example, he based the structure on the csárdás, a traditional dance consisting of two movements: one slow, or Lassú, followed by a rapid dance, the Friss. Because Bartók found it hard to decide on a suitable ending, he provided two different options in the score. The first one suddenly takes over the tempo and theme of the introductory Lassú, while the other closes with the theme from the Friss and a dazzling coda. Bartók himself had a slight preference for the second option. The rhapsody was so well received that arrangements for other instrumental combinations also appeared, including one for violin and orchestra.

George Gershwin • An American in Paris

Sounds from a new world

George Gershwin is considered one of the most popular American composers. His most important merit: breaking down boundaries between musical genres. He grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a place where composers of various origins worked alongside each other, exchanged ideas and where various past and present cultural expressions mingled. As a young singer-songwriter, he built a successful Broadway career, yet he felt something was missing. His fascination with the music of modern European composers such as Schönberg and Stravinsky impelled him to strive for a synthesis of the two worlds. In 1924, at the request of the jazz band leader Paul Whiteman, he composed his first orchestral work, Rhapsody in Blue (dubbed by the press as an ‘Experiment in Modern Music’), which received great acclaim from the celebrities of the European classical music scene. The success resulted shortly thereafter in a new commission, this time from Walter Damrosch, conductor of the New York Philharmonic. For this new composition, Gershwin drew inspiration from his recent stay in the French capital. He recorded his experiences in the form of a symphonic poem and once he had returned to the United States, he completed these sketches and titled the whole set An American in Paris. The work received its première that same year in Carnegie Hall.

Although Gershwin indicated that he did not wish to present any explicit scenes, the listener can perfectly imagine a typical Parisian scene: the bustle of night life, the music halls, a romantic walk along the Seine and the busy traffic — including actual car horns. About the latter, the musicologist Mark Clague discovered in 2016 that orchestras had for years been playing the wrong car horns. In the score, Gershwin labelled the horns with the letters a, b, c and d, but he did not mean the names of the notes here; he had entirely different notes in mind, namely, Ab, Bb, high D and low A. Critics saw the work as a hype that would soon blow over: “To conceive of a symphonic audience listening to it with any degree of pleasure or patience twenty years from now, when whoopee is no longer even a word, is another matter.” But they were wrong, as the work has been a popular work on the orchestral repertoire for almost a century.

Francis Poulenc • Les Biches

Coquettish ladies and equally charming music

Musical omnivore Francis Poulenc (1899-1963), possessed the talent to capture the atmosphere and various emotions of the 1920s in his music, which often exhibited a great sense of humor and fantasy. This is evident in his ballet Les Biches, commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes. Originally, the ballet was to be based on a scenario by fashion designer Germaine Bongard titled Les Desmoiselles, but she ultimately declined, and the ballet proceeded without a formal libretto. With Bongard’s story and the baroque paintings of Antoine Watteau, which depict Louis XV and his mistresses, in mind, Poulenc envisioned Les Biches as 'a modern ‘fêtes galantes’ set in the large, entirely white salon of a country house, furnished only with a large blue sofa. Around it frolic twenty charming and flirtatious women with three handsome, robust young men dressed as rowers.'

The ballet’s erotic narrative suggests the pleasures of fleeting affairs and free love, constantly playing with the tension between reality and fantasy. The title itself refers both to a doe (literally) and to coquettish ladies (colloquially). Musically, the ballet consists of a suite of eight dances preceded by a prelude, with some sections sung by a hidden choir. The music blends styles, incorporating elements as diverse as Mozart and Scarlatti's music, modern touches from Stravinsky, and influences from the jazz world. Poulenc was fortunate to collaborate with some of the greatest talents of the era, including choreographer Bronislava Nijinska and artist Marie Laurencin, who designed the costumes and set. The audience was wildly enthusiastic at its premiere on January 6, 1924, and Darius Milhaud exclaimed, 'I dream about it. It is a masterpiece. The music is delightful, beautifully orchestrated, always genuine, and full of emotion. The set and costumes are divine; it is Nijinska’s masterpiece. This is the most beautiful and successful ballet in Diaghilev’s repertoire.' Les Biches instantly catapulted the young composer to fame.