VFO / DUTOIT / FUJITA

While Berlioz’s 1838 opera Benvenuto Cellini was dropped by the Paris Opera after just three performances, the concert overture he rescued from its themes – notably its love duet, heard on cor anglais, and its carnival music with its saltarello dance – is a fizzing masterpiece. That same description could be applied to Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No. 2, composed in 1868 within the space of three weeks. Saint-Saëns was both a brilliant pianist and a brilliant organist, and this concerto opens with a nod to both: solo piano with a dramatic pedal point, overlaid with initially spacious upper-register figuration which gradually accelerates into virtuosic cascades – after which the orchestra presents the first theme. The other two movements are then a playful, feather-light Scherzando and a racing tarantella. Debussy’s 1905 symphonic triptych, La mer, was jointly inspired by his own lifelong attachment to the sea (‘my old friend’), and paintings of it by Turner and Hokusai. A shimmering impressionistic masterpiece of colliding rhythms and colours, it opens with, ‘From Dawn to Noon on the Sea’, which builds to a majestic brass chorale. The central ‘Play of the Waves’ has the feel of a scherzo. The concluding ‘Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea’ then re-introduces material from the first movement. The mastery of Ravel’s Boléro of 1928 – written as a Spanish-flavoured ballet for the dancer Ida Rubinstein – is then how he takes a single theme and, without any melodic development, but simply through scoring and harmony, works one of the most tautly grown crescendos in the entire symphonic canon.