Louis Langrée conducts Ravel — With David Kadouch

Join pianist David Kadouch and the Orchestre des Champs-Élysées at the Seine Musicale for an atmospheric concert dedicated to the music of Ravel, led by French conductor Louis Langrée. The program takes us through the phases of Ravel’s artistic life with a focus on his final years, which were marked by illness but also by an extraordinary creative output — including three of his most famous works presented here in specially revised versions by Kadouch and Langrée.

The opening strains of the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand (1932) begin the evening on a note of yearning, of absence. This singular work, intense and virtuosic, was written for Paul Wittgenstein, a pianist who had lost his right arm during World War I. Next comes an earlier war-inspired work: La Valse (1920), a cheeky homage to the music of Strauss that is nonetheless imbued with a certain existential malaise. Kadouch continues the hits with the kaleidoscopic Piano Concerto in G (1932) which, though premiered shortly after the more tragic concerto heard earlier, is full of vibrant and joyful colors reminiscent of Gershwin. In the wake of these lively rhythms comes the only truly fitting grand finale, the world-famous Boléro (1928). A modern danse macabre, in a sense, this irrepressible ballet music seems to celebrate, through its circular structure and devilish crescendo, the triumph of life over the vagaries of history.