LDV104

19 JEAN-BAPTISTE FONLUPT These stories have a fantastical dimension. The pieces arouse strong emotions linked to their subject matter. In Petrushka , wooden puppets come to life and experience a love story. La Valse with its ‘fantastical, fatal whirling’ and the Valses nobles et sentimentales are populated by figures from an imaginary dream world. Romeo and Juliet – from which I have selected four of the ten pieces that Prokofiev arranged for piano – is a timeless love story portraying extreme characters: the famous ‘Dance of the Knights’ ( Montagues and Capulets ) is strange and terrifying in its rhythms and its lurid harmonies. All these stories are set in a bygone age, the Romantic era in Ravel, old Russia in Stravinsky, and fourteenth-century Italy in Prokofiev, but revisited by modernist music that transforms them into phantasmagorias.