Rings of Time

The evening opens with Maurice Ravel's Mother Goose Suite (Ma mère l'Oye, 1908) - a work originally written for siblings Mimi and Jean Godebski, whose parents were among Ravel's closest friends. In 1912, he orchestrated it as a ballet, from which he later extracted the orchestral suite. We encounter fairy-tale characters such as Beauty and the Beast, Tom Thumb and Sleeping Beauty, and in the concluding Le jardin féerique we hear how the prince awakens the sleeping princess.

Thomas Adès's violin concerto, performed by Johan Dalene, is structured as a triptych with movements Rings - Paths - Rounds. The middle movement carries the work's centre of gravity and is built on two large and several smaller cycles that overlap and collide with each other on the path toward dissolution. The outer movements are also cyclical: the first fast and harmonically unstable, the third playful with stable circles at different speeds.

Jean Sibelius's Symphony No. 3 marks a stylistic break after his two earlier, nationalist-romantic symphonies. Here Sibelius seeks a more classical expression with echoes of an older aesthetic - a stylistic quest that took nearly three years, and the symphony was completed only days before its premiere in 1907.

Program: Maurice Ravel Suite from Mother Goose (approx. 17 min) - Thomas Adès Violin Concerto, Concentric Paths (approx. 20 min) - Intermission 25 minutes - Jean Sibelius Symphony No. 3 (approx. 26 min)