Dancing on the edge

French composer Pascal Dusapin is the first to admit that it’d be crazy to try and re-tell Flann O’Brien’s novel At Swim-Two-Birds in music. Instead, fascinated by the book’s ‘formal and narrative extravagance’, he’s written a double concerto like no other, wildly eccentric and inspired by the larger-than-life musical personalities of soloists Viktoria Mullova and Matthew Barley. Don’t miss one of the premieres of the year: and discover, too, Enescu’s postcard from the Carpathian Mountains and the exuberant, life-affirming symphony that Bohuslav Martinů wrote in the new world – before conductor Andrés Orozco-Estrada goes over the edge with Ravel’s deliriously decadent La valse.

At Swim-Two-Birds commissioned by BBC Radio 4’s zaterdagmatinee series in The Concertgebouw Amsterdam, London Philharmonic Orchestra (with generous support from Diaphonique, a Franco-British contemporary music fund supported by the Institut Français, the Bureau export de la musique, the British Council and Ministère de la Culture et de la communication), Gerwandhausorchester and Seattle Symphony Orchestra.