Winterlight

Hannah Selin opens the evening with the first performance of Tectonic Lullaby, for piano quintet: a lullaby laid over ground that will not hold still. Selin is a violist and a singer as well as a composer, and writes from inside the string sound rather than at it.

Ravel follows. Ma Mère l'Oye is five fairy tales for piano four hands, written for Mimie and Jean Godebski, the children of the household where Ravel was a constant guest, and he kept every page inside a child's reach. Neither Godebski child played the premiere. On 20 April 1910, at the first concert of the Société Musicale Indépendante in Paris, the pieces went to two other children: Jeanne Leleu, eleven, and Geneviève Durony, fourteen. Ravel wrote to Leleu afterwards. "When you are a great virtuosa and I either an old fogey, covered with honors, or else completely forgotten, you will perhaps have pleasant memories of having given an artist the very rare joy of hearing a work of his, one of a rather special nature, interpreted exactly as it should be." She did become a virtuosa, and a composer: her cantata Beatrix took the Prix de Rome in 1923.

Oliver Caplan's Canciones de Monteverde, chosen from this year's open call, keeps to chamber scale as well: flute and string trio, four players, no piano.

Then the room fills. Stravinsky began Petroushka not as a ballet but as a concert piece for piano and orchestra, with, in his own account, "a distinct picture of a puppet, suddenly endowed with life, exasperating the patience of the orchestra with diabolical cascades of arpeggios." Diaghilev heard the sketches and asked for a ballet instead. It reached the stage at the Théâtre du Châtelet on 13 June 1911, Nijinsky in the title role, Pierre Monteux conducting. Heard here in a chamber arrangement, the fairground is still forty minutes long, but you can see every player in it.