Let's Dance

Ravel greatly admired Schubert’s collection of Valses Nobles and Valses Sentimentales, inspiring him to write his own cycle of eight solo piano waltzes which he later orchestrated – each a sparkling jewel. His “choreographic poem” La Valse, however, is a dizzying parody of every aspect of the waltz idiom. Unable to control the wild inertia of its own energy, the piece tears itself apart from within. Saint-Saëns’s Second Piano Concerto serves as a...