LDV104

16 BALLETS You devote considerable attention to music associated with Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. The links that brought both Stravinsky and Ravel into the orbit of Diaghilev’s personality in France between 1910 and 1920 were decisive in my choice of repertory. After that, the Russian ballet tradition continued to develop in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, with Sergey Prokofiev as its most eminent representative. Dance has been an admirable story of Franco-Russian cooperation ever since the nineteenth century, and some musical illustrations of that are included here. But are these concert versions still ballet music? It’s true that in this form they’re detached from choreography, from visual spectacle; they have their own life, divorced from the dancers. And yet they remain ballet music, so close are their links with the orchestral scores. They were conceived that way. As I was playing them, I never said to myself that I should set the balletic element to one side. On the contrary, I wanted to keep its spirit. This music appeals to the imagination. It has a visual dimension, it contains action, a narrative; you meet a lot of people in it! And it’s self-sufficient, which is the big difference from the ballet music of the nineteenth century: when you listen to Tchaikovsky, you want to see the dancers . . . In these works by Ravel, Stravinsky and Prokofiev, you can very well do without them.