SYMPHONIC FAIRY TALES
2019-20 SEASON
HOLIDAYS
WITH THE BSO
FAMILY
CONCERT:
THE SNOWMAN
SAT, DEC 7, 11 AM
MEYERHOFF
HANDEL
MESSIAH
SAT, DEC 7, 3 PM
SUN, DEC 8, 3 PM
MEYERHOFF
CIRQUE
NUTCRACKER
THU, DEC 12, 8 PM
STRATHMORE
FRI, DEC 13, 8 PM
SAT, DEC 14, 3 PM
SUN, DEC 15, 3 PM
MEYERHOFF
Born in Ciboure, France, March 7, 1875;
died in Paris, France, December 28, 1937
HOLIDAY
SPECTACULAR
SAT, DEC 21, 3 PM & 8 PM
MEYERHOFF
BSOMUSIC.ORG/HOLIDAY
410.783.8000 • 1.877.BSO.1444
GROUPS OF 10+ 410.783.8170
OV E R T U R E / BSOmusic.org
Concerto, Mario Venzago, conductor.
Maurice Ravel
MEYERHOFF
16
in February 2019, performing Liszt’s Piano
MOTHER GOOSE SUITE
THU, DEC 19, 8 PM
FRI, DEC 20, 8 PM
OFFICIAL AIRLINE
OF THE BSO
Conrad Tao last appeared with the BSO
About the Concert
GOSPEL
CHRISTMAS WITH
CECE WINANS
PRESENTING
SPONSOR
Pacific symphony orchestras. Tao will also
tour with the JCT Trio—with violinist
Stefan Jackiw and cellist Jay Campbell
—to Massachusetts, Washington, D.C.,
Ohio, Texas and New Mexico.
A Warner Classics recording artist,
Tao’s debut disc Voyages was declared
a “spiky debut” by The New Yorker’s
Alex Ross. His third album, entitled
Compassion, will be released fall of 2019
and will feature works by Julia Wolfe,
Frederic Rzewski and Aaron Copland.
Tao’s career as a composer has garnered
eight consecutive ASCAP Morton Gould
Young Composer Awards and the Carlos
Surinach Prize from BMI. While serving
as the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s
Artist-in-Residence, Tao premiered his
orchestral composition, The world is very
different now, described by The New York
Times as “shapely and powerful.”
Tao was born in 1994 in Urbana, IL.
He has studied piano with Emilio
del Rosario in Chicago and Yoheved
Kaplinsky in New York and composition
with Christopher Theofanidis.
SUPPORTING
SPONSOR
Although he remained a bachelor all his
life, Maurice Ravel adored children. Two
of his small friends were Mimie and Jean
Godebski, the offspring of a Polish-
born couple whose Paris apartment and
country house, La Grangette in the Loire
Valley, was a gathering place for Ravel
and his artistic colleagues. A child at
heart, Ravel told them stories, invented
ingenious toys and games and sent them
funny postcards when he was away.
The composer’s ultimate gift—
completed at La Grangette in 1910
— was a five-part piano work for
four hands entitled Ma Mère l’oye, or
Mother Goose, after Charles Perrault’s
17 th -century collection of fairy tales.
He hoped they would learn it for
performance, but Jean and Mimie found
the work a bit too advanced for their
modest skills. Instead, Jeanne Leleu,
age six (who would have a successful
career as a pianist) and Geneviève
Duroy, age seven, gave Mother Goose’s
first performance in Paris on April 20,
1910 before a distinguished audience.
Everyone was charmed, and by 1911
Ravel had turned it into a ballet,
orchestrated with the consummate skill
that was one of his greatest talents.
The suite version of the ballet opens
with “The Pavane of Sleeping Beauty.”
This is a dream-like dance with a circling
theme played by various woodwind
soloists, delicately punctuated by plucked
strings. “Tom Thumb” is more of a
nightmare for its tiny hero lost in the
woods. Ravel quotes Perrault in the score:
“He thought he would easily find his
way thanks to the bread he had scattered
wherever he had passed, but he was quite
surprised when he couldn’t see even a
single crumb. Birds had come along and
eaten every bit.” Wandering lines in muted
strings grope their way through the forest,
while the plaintive sounds of oboe and
English horn evoke the child’s tears.
In 1889 at the Paris World Exhibition,
Ravel first heard a Javanese gamelan
orchestra, and in “Laideronnette,
Empress of the Pagodas,” he imitates the
bell-like magic of gamelan music using
the sparkling high timbres of Western
instruments and the Asian pentatonic
scale. Laideronnette, “the little ugly one,”
has been made unattractive by an evil
spell, but the happy ending will restore
her beauty. The scenario reads: “She
undressed and entered her bath. At once,
mandarins and mandarinettes set to
singing and to playing instruments. Some
had lutes made of nutshells, some had
viols made from the shells of almonds, for
their instruments had to be in proportion
to their own scale.”
“Conversations of Beauty and the Beast”
is based on one of the most famous French
fairy tales. In this sweeping romantic
waltz, Beauty is portrayed by a silky-voiced
clarinet, and the Beast is portrayed by the