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Discovering Music
Radio 3 | fully booked
Discovering Music: Milhaud & Poulenc
A ballet double bill from the playboy and bad boy of French music.
Inspired by the sounds of Brazil, Le boeuf was originally to have been the score of a silent Charlie Chaplin film. Its transformation to the stage rocked the Establishment and catapulted Milhaud to stardom. The setting is a fictional American bar frequented by a number of characters, including a bookmaker, a dwarf, a boxer, a cross-dressing woman and a policeman.
Commissioned by Sergey Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes, Les biches pushed Poulenc into fashionable circles when he was just 24. He described the work as a ‘contemporary drawing room party suffused with an atmosphere of wantonness, which you sense if you are corrupted, but of which an innocent-minded girl would not be conscious'.
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All information is correct at time of publication.
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