The Secret Society

Orchestra Wellington will perform the fourth installation of their 2024 season The Story on Saturday the 28th of September at 7:30pm at the Michael Fowler Centre. The Secret Society programme presents music by Maurice Ravel, Florent Schmitt, Claude Debussy, and Lili Boulanger with artists Dr Jian Liu and The Tudor Consort.

Celebrated piano soloist Dr Jian Liu will perform Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand – written at the request of Paul Wittgenstein, a concert pianist who had lost his right arm in WWI – while specialist early music choir The Tudor Consort will present Schmitt’s The Tragedy of Salome, the second New Zealand premiere of Orchestra Wellington’s 2024 season!

La Tragédie de Salomé begins with an Orientalist sunset in Herod’s palace overlooking the Dead Sea and culminates in a rite-like dance of terror, sweeping through a broad range of passionate emotions.

Debussy described his Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun as “a very free illustration of {Stéphane] Mallarmé’s poem… to evoke the successive scenes in which the longings and desires of the faun pass in the heat of the afternoon.”

D’un Soir Triste was one of the very last works written in Boulanger’s own hand – started in the spring of 1917, and largely finished by January 1918. The final tempo marking expresif resigné (expressive, resigned) leaves us wondering if Boulanger found acceptance, resignation, or some combination of both in what would be some of her final, fateful notes.