Tawfiq, Ravel and Bartók: colorful magicians of sound

Bela Bartók wrote the ballet music to the fairy tale of The Wooden Prince for a gigantic orchestra. He himself did not call it a ballet, but a "symphonic poem on which to dance.

Fairy ballet
In the work The Wooden Prince , Bartók connects the grand and compelling orchestral idiom of late Romanticism with his own fascination with nature and Hungarian folk music. The highly successful premiere of the fairy-tale ballet took place while outside Hungary's fate was being settled in World War I.

Colorful orchestrations
Also pleasing to the ear is the Piano Concerto in G by fine painter and master orchestrator Maurice Ravel. The concerto is classical in structure, but laced with jazz influences that the composer had brought back from a tour in the U.S. Dutch composer Hawar Tawfiq, born in the Kurdish north of Iraq, is also a skilled sound magician who likes to utilize the full orchestral palette. From him, the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra will play the world premiere of a new piece.