4 Sundays per season, the musicians of the Orchester de l'Opéra national de Paris invite you to share an hour of chamber music in the great hall of the Palais Garnier.
The tone of the Quartet will mark the modernity of Ravel and the breaking of the moorings with romanticism. The enigmatic nonchalance of the first theme, the refinement of the writing for four, of a subtlety which sometimes almost goes as far as preciousness, the appearance of mixed phlegm and melancholy which mark the opening Allegro: all this is greatest Ravel. Note also the humor that marks the second movement, with its play on the pizzicati and its rhythmic finds, the dreamy beauty of the slow movement, as well as the fascinating whirlwind sequences of the finale.
Even beyond the splendor of its themes (in particular that of the second movement, a "funeral march" in homage to that of Beethoven's Heroica ), the success of Schumann's Quintet for piano and strings (1842) is due to the prodigious balance that he manages to establish between the effectiveness of the form (a continuous progression, from the harmonic and dynamic points of view) and the freedom that the work demonstrates with regard to conventional frameworks.
