Ravel - Antar; Shéhérazade

The Guardian 60

Dussollier/Druet/ON de Lyon/Slatkin
(Naxos)

In 1910, Ravel was commissioned by Paris’s Théâtre de l’Odéon to provide the incidental music for a new play by the Lebanese writer Chekri Ganem. It was based on The Romance of Antar, a 12th-century Arabic epic about the exploits of the pre-Islamic poet and knight Antarah ibn Shaddad, and the source of the score was to be Rimsky-Korsakov’s Antar, which had begun life as a programmatic symphony in 1868 on the same theme.

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