Ivresse et volupté by Brahms, Strauss, Ravel, fös 14 apr 2023, Frá (2023/2023), Hljómsveitarstjóri Lio Kuokman, Atrium de Chaville, Chaville, France

Lio Kuokman and the Orchester national d'Île-de-France combine lyricism and sensuality. Pianist Jonathan Fournel joins them in the autumn games of Brahms' Second Concerto . When Maurice Ravel wrote La Valse (1920), he had in mind the famous Viennese waltzes by Johann Strauss which had been whirling Europe since the middle of the 19th century. Except that La Valse du Français, at first calm and voluptuous, gets carried away with passion and is disrupted by the intoxication of movement. Unless this seemingly unhinged acceleration is the symbol of the collapse of an old world which disappeared with the Great War: that of high society lost forever, which seeks in dance the oblivion of its time in order to take refuge in nostalgia, before falling suddenly. None of this is noticeable in the Rosenkavalier(1911) by Richard Strauss; the dances extracted in 1944 from this opera sound to the ears of the 20th century in the midst of world conflict, the echoes of a classic and eternal world, folded in on itself: the permanence of the same dramatically amplified waltz movement comes to immortalize the sophistication of a social class. Brahms' Second Piano Concerto (1881) has no waltz rhythm; if there is dance, it is interior. It is the piano that breathes into the orchestra this ample and mellow phrasing so characteristic of Brahms' style. The whirlwind is that of inner emotions, especially when the piano dialogues with the solo cello in the slow movement: an endless dialogue that gives access to a secret world where time cannot stop.