© Zani-Casadio

In the Veins of America

Orchestra Giovanile Luigi Cherubini
conductor
Wayne Marshall

Maurice Ravel
Alborada del gracioso
Le tombeau de Couperin
La valse

Leonard Bernstein
Three Dance Episodes from “On the Town”

George Gershwin
An American in Paris


“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” As in this epilogue to The Great Gatsby, two masters in the art of clear emotion like Maurice Ravel and George Gershwin were constantly pushed backwards into their memories: Alborada revives the Spain of Ravel’s mother’s tales; Le tombeau evokes Couperin’s irreversibly lost glories, and La valse is a deformation of Vienna’s frivolité. A similar fascination with lost worlds, narrated by an expert in symphonic tales like Wayne Marshall, resurfaces in the American visitor in Paris, who nostalgically longs for his own country. This sense of uprootedness, though, does not refuse the enjoyment of life, and triumphantly emerges in Bernstein’s On the Town, where three sailors are seduced by New York, the city that never sleeps.


Duration:
1st Part 40’ – Intermission 20’ – 2nd Part 30’
Total 1h 30’

The programme