Repertoire

Frederic Mompou: Suburbis (orq. Manuel Rosenthal) (1936) 14′
Claude Debussy: Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun), L 86 (1894) 11′
Maurice Ravel: Boléro (1928) 15′

ARTISTS

Barcelona Symphony Orchestra (OBC
Ludovic Morlot, conductor

Programme

Before the concert, Jordi Oriol and the Indi Gest company will introduce the work by means of a dramatised presentation explaining its context, in a free, creative format.

The Barcelona Symphony Orchestra’s music director, Ludovic Morlot, conducts two key works in the history of music: Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun) and Maurice Ravel’s Bolero.

Written between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these are two of the key works of French Impressionism. The first was inspired by a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé. The programme for the premiere described it «not as a synthesis of the poem, but a succession of settings», a revolutionary composition that led to new forms of music.

Bolero, meanwhile, is not only one of Ravel’s best known works, but one of the most famous in the entire history of music. Although originally a ballet, it soon became a great success in concert halls, with performances causing heated disputes.

Outside France, many other composers were influenced by Impressionism. One of them was Catalan composer Frederic Mompou (1893-1987), and today we shall be hearing the orchestral version of his Suburbis (1936), a collection of five pieces for piano, in which the composer captures impressions of his walks around Montjuïc. The music evokes the atmosphere and the characters of an area which, at the beginning of the 20th century, was no more than a hill on the edge of Barcelona.