Pictures at an Exhibition by Ravel, Gerhard, R., Mussorgsky, De (2025/2025), Director musical Ludovic Morlot, L'Auditori, Barcelona, Spain

The 1919 version for orchestra of Maurice Ravel’s Alborada del gracioso is a chromatically intriguing piece. It evokes the delicate beauty of the dawn, becoming progressively livelier, featuring instruments such as the harp, flute and bassoon, with a rhythmic element emphasised by the percussion. Carolin Widmann will play the Violin Concerto that Robert Gerhard wrote between 1942 and 1943. His knowledge of the new music owed much to the time he spent studying under Arnold Schönberg in Vienna and Berlin, as a result of which the two became close friends. The orchestral version of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, produced by Maurice Ravel almost 50 years after the original for piano, traces a journey through landscapes that are never entirely fictitious, represented in the borderline realm between wakefulness and sleep, where mental activity and the dream world are merged.