Yesterday afternoon's performance by the NY Philharmonic was the first of this season's Saturday matinee series in which members of the orchestra perform a chamber piece in the first half followed by a full orchestral work in the second.
This season's chamber music focus is on French composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the concert began with the String Quartet in F (1903) by Maurice Ravel. This is a fairly early piece which Ravel wrote while still a student of Fauré to whom it is dedicated. Ironically, Fauré did not think very highly of the work and actually referred to the final movement as "stunted, badly balanced, in fact a failure." The work was composed only ten years after Debussy had written his own quartet and comparisons are often drawn between the two, especially since both use fundamentally the same structure. Ravel, however, saw his quartet as an early example of neoclassicism and fundamentally different from what Debussy had attempted. According to Ravel:
"Stravinsky is often considered the leader of neoclassicism, but don't forget that my String Quartet was already conceived in terms of four-part counterpoint, whereas Debussy's Quartet is purely harmonic in conception."
The quartet was performed by Sheryl Staples (violin), Michelle Kim (violin), Cynthia Phelps (viola) and Carter Brey (cello).
The second half of the program consisted of Pictures at an Exhibition that was originally composed for piano by Modest Mussorgsky in 1874 and subsequently arranged for orchestra by Ravel in 1922. The work is essentially a tone poem that was inspired by a posthumous exhibit of drawings by Victor Hartman, a close friend of Mussorgsky's who had died the year before. The listener follows a "Promenade" theme as he moves from a musical description of one drawing to the next. This is an extremely popular piece of music and a specialty of conductor Charles Dutoit who has previously performed it with this orchestra.
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