Concertgebouw Orchestra plays Ravel and music by Dutch composers

Amsterdam, jazz, fairy-tales and the call of the East

Echoes of Ravel’s colourful musical fairy tales ring through the work of Amsterdam composers Leo Smit and Theo Loevendie.

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Theo Loevendie - image: Jorne Tielemans
dates and tickets
This concert, filled with colour and rhythm, links Ravel with two eminent Dutch composers

Echoes of Ravel’s colourful musical fairy tales ring through the work of Amsterdam composers Leo Smit and Theo Loevendie.

Save as favorite
This concert, filled with colour and rhythm, links Ravel with two eminent Dutch composers

Concert programme

  • Leo Smit

    Silhouetten

  • Maurice Ravel

    Shéhérazade

  • -- interval --

  • Theo Loevendie

    Six Turkish Folk Poems

  • Maurice Ravel

    Ma mère l'Oye: Suite

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About this concert

Maurice Ravel’s song cycle Shéhérazade, based on stories from the One Thousand and One Nights, is filled with the flavours of the Middle East, which, in the early twentieth century, exerted a strong influence on West Europeans. One hundred years ago this month, Ravel conducted the Concertgebouw Orchestra in his Ma mère Oye, based on another collection, The Tales of Mother Goose

This concert, filled with colour and rhythm, links Ravel with two eminent Dutch composers who studied in Amsterdam: Leo Smit (1900-1944) and Theo Loevendie (1930). 

Loevendie is a jazz musician who, since the 1960s, has grown to become one of the Netherlands’ most esteemed composers. His fascination with Turkish culture reverberates through his Six Turkish Folk Poems. It will be played in an orchestration made by his former student, Wilbert Bulsink, who was also commissioned by the Concertgebouw Orchestra to compose a prelude for the work. Leo Smit, like Loevendie, also relied heavily on Ravel and jazz, as can be heard in his Silhouettes. The piece, written while Smit was still a composition student in Amsterdam, was premiered by the Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1925.

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