Ravel's La Valse

We saw this piece guest-conducted by JoAnn Falletta with the SSO.

It's a piece we've heard before, used for a Balanchine ballet of the same name. (While Ravel originally planned the piece years before he worked on it in full, he ended up completing it in 1920 as a commission for a ballet that was never performed for Sergei Diaghilev.)

This is an interesting & engaging waltz. It's heavy on woodwinds.

Ravel described La Valse as an "apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, which was linked in my mind with an impression of a fantastic whirl of destiny leading to death." The program says it "proclaims its arrival as surely the most stridently modern work of its day."