Work: 4 Orchestral Pieces, Op.12

Even in a festival anchored around a handful of 20th-century composers touched by the presence of war – Benjamin Britten, Dmitri Shostakovich, Béla Bartók, Witold Lutosławski – the program on Thursday night with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin and their chief conductor, Marek Janowski, was especially haunted by the memory of atrocity. It was a night of tough music with little reprieve.

L'Orchestre de Paris sous la direction du chef slovaque Juraj Valčuha nous offre un programme original autour d'un Bartók plutôt timide, d'un Prokofiev admirable de poésie (avec le violoniste Vadim Gluzman) et d'un Janáček luxuriant.