Birthday Bonbons
Evening Music | May 6, 2010
Sprinkled throughout the evening are Birthday Bonbons by Jacques Ibert. (You’ve got three guesses as to who was born on this day in the year 1890!)
You’re right, of course! Put 114 candles on the cake, and enjoy three charmers by Jacques Ibert: first, let us embark with “En barque, le soir...” as played by harpist Ernestine Stoop. Later on, we’ll enjoy evocations of one of the world’s great cities as we listen to his Suite symphonique: “Paris.” Later still, we’ll delight at the wit, flippancy, and satire of the “Divertissement” (originally a suite of incidental music for Labiche’s farce “Italian Straw Hat”).
Meanwhile, notes that are slightly more serious sparkle in the air when clarinetist James Campbell joins the Borodin Trio for Mozart’s Clarinet Trio, K 498. An Ibert compatriot from an earlier era, Georges Bizet, took some movements from a piano-four-hands suite and arranged them for orchestra—a work we know as “Jeux d’enfants” (Children’s Games), played for us this evening by the Toronto Symphony under Andrew Davis.
Beethoven’s very first symphony is showcased by David Zinman and the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra; Murray Perahia joins the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields for Bach’s Keyboard Concerto No. 4; and Martha Argerich and Alexandre Rabinovitch illuminate Rachmaninoff’s Suite No. 2 for two pianos. Quite an evening!
You’re right, of course! Put 114 candles on the cake, and enjoy three charmers by Jacques Ibert: first, let us embark with “En barque, le soir...” as played by harpist Ernestine Stoop. Later on, we’ll enjoy evocations of one of the world’s great cities as we listen to his Suite symphonique: “Paris.” Later still, we’ll delight at the wit, flippancy, and satire of the “Divertissement” (originally a suite of incidental music for Labiche’s farce “Italian Straw Hat”).
Meanwhile, notes that are slightly more serious sparkle in the air when clarinetist James Campbell joins the Borodin Trio for Mozart’s Clarinet Trio, K 498. An Ibert compatriot from an earlier era, Georges Bizet, took some movements from a piano-four-hands suite and arranged them for orchestra—a work we know as “Jeux d’enfants” (Children’s Games), played for us this evening by the Toronto Symphony under Andrew Davis.
Beethoven’s very first symphony is showcased by David Zinman and the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra; Murray Perahia joins the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields for Bach’s Keyboard Concerto No. 4; and Martha Argerich and Alexandre Rabinovitch illuminate Rachmaninoff’s Suite No. 2 for two pianos. Quite an evening!
