BIZET: L’Arlésienne – excerpts
IBERT: Flute Concerto
CHAUSSON: Symphony
Benoît Fromanger, conductor
Juliette Hurel, flute
Philippe Nahon, actor (Narration of L'Arlésienne, from Alphonse Daudet's Lettres de mon moulin [Letters From My Mill])
Irresistible! — A programme that is French through and through! L’Arlésienne is a musical setting of Alphonse Daudet’s “melodrama” fashioned from his own famous “Lettres de mon moulin” (Letters from my Windmill). Bizet’s music is filled with Provencal folk idioms and the characteristic tones of southern France. Ibert’s brilliant, modern, and highly seductive work for flute is performed by Juliette Hurel, Principal Flute of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, and conductor Benoît Fromanger, also a flautist of great renown. Chausson’s symphony, a pinnacle of the symphonic genre in France, retains irrepressible warmth and vibrancy.
