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Gerald Carpenter: CAMA’s French Radio Orchestra Revels in Ravel
The next installment of the International Series of the Community Arts Music Association will be a concert by the Orchestre Philharmonique De Radio France at 8 p.m. Tuesday at The Granada, 1214 State St.
The orchestra will be conducted by Korean-born maestro Myung-Whun Chung and feature as a soloist soprano Anne-Sofie von Otter.
The program is devoted in its entirety to the works of Maurice Ravel (1875-1937). We will hear the one-act ballet Ma mère l’Oye (“Mother Goose”) from 1912 (an expanded and orchestrated version of a suite for piano, four hands, written in 1908); the three-song cycle Shéhérazade (1903), setting poems by Tristan Klingsor; Suites One and Two of the ballet Daphnis et Chloé (1912), adapted by legendary choreographer Michel Fokine, from a Greek romance of the same name attributed to a sophist name Longus, who may have lived in the 4th or 5th century of what is now known as the “Common Era” (AD); and another “choreographic poem,” La valse, composed in 1920 but conceived 15 years earlier.
We like our composers in pairs: Bach-Handel; Haydn-Mozart; Beethoven-Schubert; Bruckner-Mahler. “The pairing doesn’t make much sense,” the great Erich Leinsdorf observed, “since one was a Catholic mystic, and the other a cosmopolitan Jew.”
Ravel is, of course, traditionally yoked to Claude Debussy — they were French, they knew and admired each other, and if you don’t listen too carefully, they even sound a bit alike — but I tend to link Ravel more intimately with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov than anyone else. Both composers were brilliant orchestrators, and both arranged works by Modest Mussorgsky, exponentially widening the audience for those works. Both men were nostalgic — Ravel almost pathologically so — and both were drawn to the exotic, the strange.
For a long time, there was an intense cultural affinity between Moscow and Paris, an affinity that led to political alliance (it was a mutual defense treaty between Russia and France that sent the European snowball downhill into World War I).
“Romanticism,” art historian Geoffrey Scott wrote, “may be said to consist in a high development of poetic sensibility towards the remote, as such. It idealizes the distant, both of time and place; it identifies beauty with strangeness. In the curious and the extreme, which are disdained by classical taste, and in the obscure detail which that taste is too abstract to include, it finds fresh sources of inspiration. It is most often retrospective, turning away from the present, however valuable, as being familiar. It is always idealistic, casting on the screen of an imaginary past the projection of its unfulfilled desires.”
That sure sounds like Ravel to me.
Tickets to Tuesday’s concert are available from the Granada box office at 1214 State St. or 805-899-2222, or click here to purchase tickets online.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributor. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
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