Symphonic dances

Alongside the new creation for trombone and orchestra Stardust by Hungarian composer Judit Varga, the Opéra national de Lorraine Orchestre and the conductor Emilio Pomarico bring out all the colours of symphonic music in a programme devoted to three true geniuses of modern orchestration.

Ravel's most famous work, originally conceived as a kind of private joke in which the tireless repetition of the same melody, far more subtle than it seems, is made bearable only by the variations and masterly ever intensifying orchestration, as all other aspects remain indefinitely blocked, until a final modulation brings an intense sense of release! Shostakovich's Tahiti Trot is also a practical joke in a sense, if we are to believe the legend of its composition. In the autumn of 1928, at the very moment Ravel's Boléro was premiered in Paris, the Russian composer was at a reception with the conductor Nikolai Malko. A record of a popular tune was playing on the phonograph: Tahiti Trot (Tea for Two) from Vincent Youmans' successful musical No, No, Nanette. Challenged to do better after severely criticizing the arrangement, Shostakovich locks himself away for 45 minutes and emerges with a work in which the work's flimsy nature is sublimated by a display of orchestral ideas of seemingly inexhaustible originality!

At its premiere in 1910, the first of Stravinsky's scores for the Ballets Russes, The Firebird introduced an astonished Parisian public to a combination of shimmering and vivid colours that opened up the half-European, half-Eastern poetic universe of the Russian imagination at once.