Dancing Fools & Boléro

Dancing Fools & Boléro
with Johan Dalene as soloist in Korngold's Violin Concerto

Between 1920 and 1925, Svenska Baletten in Paris was a melting pot of boundary-crossing dance and stage art. The ballet company brought together the era's most gifted avant-garde artists: composers Erik Satie and Darius Milhaud, writer Jean Cocteau, and poet Paul Claudel. Set designers Nils Dardel and Fernand Léger moved in its innermost circles.

In 1920, young Swedish composer Viking Dahl wrote the one-act ballet Dårhuset (Maison de fous), based on Pär Lagerkvists play Himlens hemlighet - a work called the first significant Swedish modernist work of its kind. Maurice Ravel was also impressed and encouraged Dahl to continue his composition studies with Charles Koechlin. In Lagerkvists drama, as in Dårhuset, we encounter a group of individuals trapped in their own absurd fantasy worlds, where a young man - in the ballet a young woman - enters a search for meaning but is destroyed in the attempt. Musicologist Anders Viklund has developed a new critical edition and new material for the work, which is now performed for the first time.

Maurice Ravels Boléro (1928) is built on a single melody that repeats and grows in power, carried by a steady drum rhythm through shifting orchestral colours. Without genuine thematic or motivic development, Ravel creates tension solely through instrumentation and dynamics. Ravel had previously orchestrated Le Tombeau de Couperin for Svenska Baletten, but he wrote Boléro for the Russian Ballet in Paris, which was active at the same time.

The season's featured artist, Johan Dalene, appears for the second time this season as soloist in Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Violin Concerto in D major (1945). Written in exile in the USA and dedicated to Alma Mahler, the concerto weaves in themes from Korngold's film music and combines romantic warmth with the tonal world of cinema.

Program

Germaine Tailleferre "Valse des dépêches" from The Wedding at the Eiffel Tower (approx. 4 min)
Erich Korngold Violin Concerto in D major (approx. 23 min)
Intermission 25 minutes
Viking Dahl Maison de fous, Dårhuset