Daphnis And Chloe

Riccardo Chailly pays tribute to Maurice Ravel with a program of waltzes and wild reveries of ecstasy and elegance. He ushers us into Ravels musical worlds filled with ever-changing colors, scents, and flavors: the pulsating three-quarter time of waltzes that reflect just how much the Great War transformed European culture, the ancient love story of Daphnis and Chloé, and the relentless rhythms of Boléro. Magnifique! Recorded live at the Concert Hall of KKL Luzern, August 2018.

Following on from Callirhoé (André Cardinal Destouches), Sémélé (Marin Marais) and Proserpine (Jean-Baptiste Lully), three important tragédies lyriques rescued from oblivion by Hervé Niquet and Le Concert Spirituel, Glossa is now restoring to the catalogue and within its collection of French Baroque opera, a recording made in Metz in December 2001: Daphnis et Chloé, the work which was to add Joseph Bodin de Boismortier to the roll call of the history of music in a most determined fashion.

Ravel’s early masterpiece, Daphnis et Chloé, was commissioned by Serge Diaghilev for his Ballets Russes, and was premièred in the Théâtre du Châtelet in July 1912. Described by Ravel as a ‘symphonie chorégraphique’ (choreographic symphony), the work was performed just twice in that 1912 season, and was given only three more performances the following year. Press reaction was muted, and it is now much more often performed as a concert work than as a ballet.

In this 2006 recording of Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé, Myung-Whun Chung leading the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France turns in a lithe, lean, limber, and lovely performance – but not ultimately a persuasive performance. Described by the composer as a "Symphonie chorégraphique," Daphnis et Chloé is not just another brilliantly colorful, appealingly tuneful, and irresistibly rhythmic work in Ravel's canon; it is also by far his most dramatically cohesive and formally unified large-scale work. These were the crucial qualities the great performances of the past – Cluytens, Monteux, and Martinon – had in equal measure.

The creative music woven out of the synthesizer by the composer Isao Tomita for the past five years has been a wonder of a glorious new development in music. In Japan his name has almost become synonomous with synthesizer music, and he has also become a hero to those young people who wish to listen to a sound coming from over the horizon. Even more vigorous attention has been given to Tomita's synthesizer music in America, and every album he has released through RCA Records has reached a top-ranking position on the charts.