Eloïse Bella Kohn, piano: Schubert and Ravel – CANCELLED

Eloïse Bella Kohn is a young French pianist who lives between Paris and Vienna. To launch her new album Parisienne, featuring Massenet and Ravel's piano concertos with the Berlin Radio Orchestra RSB, she conceived a recital program exploring the inspirations of Maurice Ravel. During the last year of his life, Schubert composed the Three Piano Pieces despite his illness. Oscillating between dark passages and unexpected flashes of light in the first piece, melancholy and lyricism in the second, rhythmic obsessions reminiscent of swirling Czech rhythms in the third, an incredible emotional force emanates from them. Ravel explains that he had "the intention of composing a chain of waltzes following the example of Schubert". This is an opportunity to juxtapose the Valses nobles et sentimentales with their Schubertian model, marked by the elegance of the Viennese salons. They are veritable gems of sound, lasting just a few seconds, and demonstrate Schubert's talent for the miniature. Ravel's waltzes were premiered amid protests and booing, such was the astonishment of the audience at the refined dissonance of his harmonies. Gaspard de la nuit is Ravel's emblematic masterpiece for solo piano. From the exaltation of Ondine, genius of the waters, to the sinister immobility of Gibet, then to the demonic dance of the gnome Scarbo, it dazzles with its virtuosity.