First Things 2024

Anyone who has seen the conductor Elim Chan on stage is familiar with the immense energy produced by her baton. With the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, of which she has been Principal Conductor since 2019, she celebrates a genre dear to her heart, ballet music, which places the emphasis on both physical movement and orchestral power. More than a century of ballet music is presented here, with excerpts from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet suites, oscillating between passionate love and fatal violence; Suite no.2 from Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé , the fruit of his first collaboration with Diaghilev in 1912, which he described as a ‘choreographic symphony’; and finally a work by Elizabeth Ogonek, All These Lighted Things , premiered in 2017. Although the title of these ‘three little dances for orchestra’ comes from a poem that evokes a soothing union with the earth at the dawn of a sunny day, the piece ends with a sort of folk dance that degenerates into an orchestral storm.