Bertrand Chamayou | Piano
Dalia Stasevska | Conductor
- Missy Mazzoli | Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres)
- Maurice Ravel | Piano Concerto in G major
- Witold Lutosławski | 4th Symphony
- Maurice Ravel | La Valse
Anyone who invites Finnish conductor Dalia Stasevska is sure to find beaming faces in the orchestra and the audience alike. And a concert program that never falls flat. Here now: this year’s celebrant, Maurice Ravel, in dialogue with the master of Polish modernism, Witold Lutosławski. Maurice Ravel is represented with two of his most fast-paced works: “La valse,” this grotesque swan song to the Viennese waltz, which spirals into the abyss with greater fury and intoxication. And the G major Piano Concerto, with its jazz stylistic elements, entirely indebted to the fashion of the 1930s. This music, too, is as breathless as the times, a ceaseless frenzy. Guest piano player with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra: the Frenchman Bertrand Chamayou, whose DNA has included Ravel’s music since his early days at the conservatory. Ravel himself was a regular guest in New York jazz clubs, and so Chamayou knows: This music should sound “like a great, brilliant improvisation.” Austerity, yes, brittleness, no: that is the ideal of the pianist, whose CD recordings of Ravel’s complete piano works ten years ago were hailed as “his masterpiece” (FonoForum) and “a sensation” (Stereoplay).