Ravel: Daphnis And Chloe

Bano:Petitgirard

Regular: £11.49

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Cat No: 8570075

Release Date: 09 January 2006

Label: Naxos - Nxc / Naxos Classics

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 747313007578

Genres: Classical

Composer/Series: RAVEL

Description
Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) Daphnis et Chloé Born in 1875 in the small coastal village of Ciboure in the Basque region of France, Maurice Ravel spent his childhood and adolescence principally in Paris, starting piano lessons at the age of seven and from the age of fourteen studying the piano in the preparatory piano class of the Conservatoire. In 1895 he left the Conservatoire, after failing to win the prizes necessary for promotion, but resumed studies there three years later under Gabriel Fauré. His repeated failure to win the important Prix de Rome, even when well enough established as a composer, disqualified at his fifth attempt in 1905, resulted in a scandal that led to changes in the Conservatoire, of which Fauré became director.Ravel’s career continued successfully in the years before 1914 with a series of works of originality, including important additions to the piano repertoire, to the body of French song and, with commissions for ballets. During the war he enlisted in 1915 as a driver and the war years left relatively little time or will for composition, particularly with the death of his mother in 1917. By 1920, however, he had begun to recover his spirits and resumed work, with a series of compositions, including an orchestration of his choreographic poem La valse, rejected by the Russian impresario Diaghilev and the cause of a rupture in their relations. He undertook a number of engagements as a pianist and conductor in concerts of his own works, in France and abroad. All this was brought to an end by his protracted final illness, attributed to a taxi accident in 1932, which led to his eventual death in 1937.Ravel’s symphonie choréographique, Daphnis et Chloé, is based on the Greco-Roman pastoral romance by Longus, a writer of the second century A.D. about whom little otherwise is known. Described in its title as The Lesbian Pastorals of Daphnis and Chloé, the love-story is set on the island of Lesbos, where, after various misfortunes, the lovers of the title are eventually happily re-united. The idea for the ballet came from the Russian choreographer Michel Fokine and was his last work for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, brought to the stage of the Paris Théâtre du Châtelet in difficult circumstances. Fokine had nurtured the idea of a Greek ballet on the subject for some years, and presented his scenario to the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, where he was principal dancer, in 1904. In 1909 he had joined Diaghilev in Paris as principal choreographer and now saw the opportunity for the creation of his greatest masterpiece. By 1910 Diaghilev had commissioned music for Daphnis et Chloé from Ravel, but there were delays in the composition. The scenario by Fokine was adjusted by Ravel, who, in any case, saw the story through the prism of Amyot’s sixteenth-century French translation of Longus and t
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