Ravel composed his cycle Mirrors for piano in 1904/1905. Perhaps the most popular piece of the series is Alborada del gracioso, the only one having a Spanish, not a French, title. The word “alborada” means aubade or morning love song, and “gracioso” is the comic Jester character in Spanish stage writers (such as Calderon and Lope de Vega). The piano piece was orchestrated by the composer himself in 1918, possibly highlighting to a greater extent than the original the humorous character of the piece.

Claude Debussy composed Images, a three-piece cycle for piano, in 1894. The cycle was only eventually published in its entirety in 1977, entitled Image (oubliées). The reason for adding the words “forgotten” was to prevent it from being confused with his other two popular Images cycles, published in 1905 and 1907 respectively. Maurice Ravel orchestrated the Sarabande in 1923, and Zoltán Kocsis created an orchestral transcription of the other two pieces. The first, “melancholic and sweet” first piece is followed by the Sarabande, which Debussy instructed to be performed “[…] with dignified and slow elegance, not unlike an old portrait, a memory from the Louvre, etc. […]” The vigorous and humorous third piece is based on the first line of the French nursery song “Nous n’irons plus au bois”.

Images (oubliées)

No. I. Lent (Mélancolique et doux)

No. II. Sarabande (Ravel’s orchestration)

No. III. Quelques aspects

George Gershwin composed An American in Paris in March 1928. Consisting of three, closely connected parts, the orchestral work seeks “to portray the impression of an American visitor in Paris as he strolls about the city and listens to various street noises and absorbs the French atmosphere.” This description best fits the first part, which is followed by a blues-style second part in which “our American friend […] has succumbed to a spasm of homesickness”. Yet, as Gershwin notes, “nostalgia is not a fatal disease”, and in the third part the American visitor “once again is an alert spectator of Parisian life”.

An American in Paris received its world première in New York on 13 December 1928. Asked whether it would become part of the classical repertoire, the composer said, “It’s not a Beethoven Symphony, you know […] It’s a humorous piece, nothing solemn about it. It’s not intended to draw tears. If it pleases symphony audiences as a light, jolly piece, a series of impressions musically expressed, it succeeds.”

J. S. Bach is believed to have composed his violin concertos during his service in Leipzig, where he worked as the Kapellmeister of Thomaskirche from 1723 to his death in 1750. However, thanks to a company consisting of professional musicians and college students, the Collegium Musicum, he had the opportunity to compose secular music. The first movement of the E-major violin concerto consists of three parts. In the first, the short solo sections are incorporated into the orchestra’s opening theme in the form of variation and development. The second part consists of longer solo sections. The third is a return of the first part. The famous C-sharp-minor Adagio of the work begins with an emphatic bass theme, whose characteristic opening motif intertwines the entire movement. The violin concerto ends with the triple-time, dance-like third movement.

Bernstein’s West Side Story is the first musical in the modern sense of the word. Compared to many other musicals, it owes its value to a well-chosen script in that it is a musical setting of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The 1957 Broadway première of West Side Story was an immense success, and the work earned six Tony Awards and the 1961 film adaptation won 10 of 11 Oscar nominations.

In West Side Story dance assumes a crucial role as a spectacular theatrical device and a means of communication and expressing emotion. There is dance not only in the colourful cavalcade of the dance-school scene (Mambo, Cha-cha), but also in the subdued scene of the American Jets gang and its leader Riff (the Cool fugue) and the duel between the leaders of the rival gangs is also expressed in dance. Accordingly, when Bernstein compiled an orchestral suite from the music of West Side story, he gave it the title Symphonic Dances. The music of the suite incorporates all of the musical layers of the original work, from cool jazz, Latin-American group dance to Stravinskyan classical music.