Ravel, de Falla, Nielsen

Two of Mexico’s most brilliant musicians conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto (‘fantastically physical with an intense sense of momentum and power’ (Limelight) and Jorge Federico Osorio (‘one of the more elegant and accomplished pianists on the planet (Los Angeles Times) lead a concert featuring Falla’s sensuous evocation of an exotically perfumed Spanish garden, Ravel’s heady, jazz-accented piano concerto for left hand, and Nielsen’s dramatic battle between darkness and light.

Originally composed as a set of nocturnes for solo piano, the re-working of Falla’s Nights in the Garden of Spain for piano and orchestra resulted in music of a luxuriant and lush sensuousness. The outer movements offer a series of richly executed impressions of the Generalife Gardens in Alhambra and the gardens of the Sierra de Córdoba and frame an animated dance in an imaginary garden in which the piano variously conjures a strumming Spanish guitar, a dancer and a singer.

Undeterred by losing his right arm during World War I, in peacetime the pianist Paul Wittgenstein (brother of the philosopher, Ludwig) set about commissioning new music to create his own repertoire for left-hand alone. Among those who created such works were Richard Strauss, Benjamin Britten and Ravel, whose piano concerto he first performed in 1932. Making few concessions to Wittengstein’s impairment, it’s a work of considerable drama and accented with idioms borrowed from American jazz and Spanish folk music and boasting a bewitching Adagio at its centre.

The most important Danish composer of the first half of the last century, Carl Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony was completed in 1922. Although reluctant to explain its meaning – some hear it as a symphony about war, others a musical depiction of the conflict between darkness and light, good and evil – he offered the following qualified description: ‘I’m rolling a stone up a hill, I’m using the powers in me to bring the stone to the top. The stone lies there so still, powers are wrapped in it, until I give it a kick and the same powers are released and the stone rolls down again. But you mustn’t take that as a programme!’

SOUNDINGS 6.30pm Conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto and pianist Jorge Federico Osorio in conversation