Cassandra Miller, György Kurtág, Maurice Ravel
octoberoct 16
© BBC philharmonic l, Aldeburgh Festival 2023 © bpa ©
Friday october 16
20h
György Kurtág, STHLH (Stele) (1994).
György Kurtág, a selection of 6 pieces from Játékok and 5 pieces from Concerto for the Left Hand (1973–).
Maurice Ravel, Concerto for the Left Hand (1929–1930).
Cassandra Miller, Dad Goes to the Mountain (2026), commissioned
by the Brussels Philharmonic, BBC Radio 3, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, the Auditori Barcelona, Radio France and the Festival d’Automne à Paris. French premiere.
Maurice Ravel, Ma Mère l’Oye: 5 Pieces for Children (Suite) (1908–1910).
Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra
Matthias Pintscher conductor
Pierre-Laurent Aimard piano
Radio France Auditorium and le Festival d’Automne à Paris present this concert as a co-production.
With the support of
This second part of the Portrait dedicated to Cassandra Miller associates Dad Goes to the Mountain, a quadriptych to be performed uninterrupted, dedicated to her aged, increasingly forgetful father with the themes of childhood and death. It mirrors the arc of our existences, to which Ravel and Kurtág lend themselves.
Ravel had a love of the wondrous, the fairy-tale like and ingenious toys. Ma Mère l’Oye (Mother Goose) takes its inspiration from famous fairy tales. A reduced orchestra, with clearly defined timbres, colours its different atmospheres, shifting between oriental or dream-like, dark or enchanting. From within his vast cycle of Játékok(Games), pedagogical pieces often of a miniature kind, Kurtág evokes the joy of movement, sentence and gesture, as well as the exploration of the piano’s keyboard, resembling a “pilgrimage to find the child within us once again”.
At the other extremity of life, the virtuoso piece Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, a composition for the pianist Paul Wittgenstein whose right arm was amputated during the First World War, is one of Ravel’s final works. Its tragic vehemence appears to culminate in the memory of the catastrophe of the trenches. With the funeral symphony STHLH (Stele), Kurtág moves in the direction of sparsity, stripped-down essence, lamentation and the deploring, like an immense lake of tears.
See also
