Domingo Hindoyan
Domingo Hindoyan was born in Caracas in 1980 to a violinist father and a lawyer mother. He started his musical career as a violinist in the ground-breaking Venezuelan musical education programme El Sistema. He studied conducting at Haute Ecole de Musique in Geneva, where he gained his masters, and in 2012 was invited to join the Allianz International Conductor’s Academy, through which he worked with the London Philharmonic and the Philharmonia Orchestra and with conductors like Esa-Pekka Salonen and Sir Andrew Davis.
He was appointed first assistant conductor to Daniel Barenboim at the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin in 2013, and in 2019, he took up a position as principal guest conductor of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra. In the same year, he made his debut with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and was appointed as the Orchestra’s new Chief Conductor in 2020, taking up his position in September 2021. He has now extended his contract with the Orchestra to 2028.
Carolyn Sampson
Equally at home on the concert and opera stages, British soprano Carolyn Sampson has enjoyed notable successes in the UK as well as throughout Europe and the rest of the world. She recently celebrated her recording legacy with the release of her 100th album as a featured solo artist. Over the last 25 years of her career, Sampson has sung with countless world-class musicians, and these recordings serve as testament to both her versatility as an artist and the scope of her repertoire. In 2024 she was also awarded an OBE in the King’s New Year Honours, was elected an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music and won Gramophone Artist of the Year. Having begun her career in the early music world, Sampson has forged long-standing relationships with many renowned groups among them Bach Collegium Japan, the Academy of Ancient Music, The Sixteen, and Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century. She also cherishes her relationships with some of the world’s finest symphony orchestras with whom she has been a regular guest and has had the pleasure with working with many inspiring conductors. On the opera stage she has sung the title role in Semele and Pamina in The Magic Flute for English National Opera, various roles in Purcell’s The Fairy Queen for Glyndebourne Festival Opera (released on DVD), and Anne Truelove in The Rake’s Progress and Mélisande in Pelléas et Mélisande in Sir David McVicar’s productions for Scottish Opera. She has also appeared at Opéra de Paris, Opéra de Lille, Opéra de Montpellier and Opéra National du Rhin, and sang the title role in Lully’s Psyché for the Boston Early Music Festival, which was released on CD and subsequently nominated for a Grammy in 2008. A consummate recitalist, Sampson appears regularly at Wigmore Hall and has given recitals at the Oxford International Song Festival, Leeds Lieder, Saintes and Aldeburgh Festivals as well as at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Barcelona, Freiburg, Oper Frankfurt, Pierre Boulez Saal Berlin, Vienna Konzerthaus, Carnegie Hall and on tour in Japan.Recent performances include Haydn’s Die Schöpfung/Creation with both the Orchestre de Chambre de Paris under Masaaki Suzuki and with the CBSO under Kazuki Yamada, a European tour with Bach Collegium Japan, solo programmes with La Scintilla at Opernhaus Zurich with Riccardo Minassi, with the Freiburger Barockorchester, and appearances with the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks and Dresdner Philharmonie. Sampson has had a celebrated song partnership with pianist Joseph Middleton for over a decade
Maurice Ravel
While chiefly known by the wider public for the five minutes of music which carried Torvill and Dean to ice dancing victory, there is much more to Maurice Ravel than just Boléro. Over a four-decade career, the Frenchman became a master craftsman of imaginatively orchestrated, vividly textured work, rich with elegant (and eloquent) melodies. Born in 1875 in Cibourne, across the harbour from St Jean de Luz on France’s border with the Basque country, Ravel was attracted to all things Spanish – although he only set foot in the country for the first time at the age of 38. Musically, he was also influenced by Erik Satie, Stravinsky (a friend), by jazz, and by French Romantic composer and poet Emmanuel Chabrier. Ravel started music lessons at seven and gave his first piano recital aged 14, entering the Paris Conservatoire, where he won first prize in piano in 1891. Later, he would study composition there with Gabriel Fauré. A master orchestrator as well as a gifted composer, Ravel’s catalogue embraces concertos and chamber works, piano pieces and operas, including the 1899 piece Pavane pour une infante défunte, orchestral work Mother Goose, Piano Concerto No.1, the 1920 La Valse, and ballet Daphnis et Chloé, commissioned in 1909 by Diaghilev for the Ballet Russes. When the First World War broke out, Ravel enlisted in an artillery regiment, driving munitions under bombardment. But war scarred the composer both physically and mentally, and in its aftermath he decamped from Paris to a small commune where he lived for the rest of his life – and from where he embarked on a host of international tours throughout the 1920s. In his final years Ravel suffered from a mystery neurological disorder, and he died in 1937, aged 62. Did you know? Ravel’s father was an engineer who invented the Whirlwind of Death loop-the-loop machine which was displayed at Barnum and Bailey’s Circus in the early 1900s, but which ultimately was a failure – one story suggests it was involved in a near-death accident.
Joseph Canteloube
Like his British contemporaries Vaughan Williams and George Butterworth, pianist, composer and musicologist Joseph Canteloube was passionate about folk songs and published several collections garnered from across France. Canteloube was born Marie Joseph Canteloube de Malaret in Annonay in the Auvergne, the rural and mountainous region in the heart of France, in 1879. And his surroundings would greatly influence his work. He initially studied piano with a female pupil of Chopin before enrolling in the Schola Cantorum in Paris where he was a student of its founder Vincent d’Indy. Towards the end of his life, he would write his former tutor’s biography. Canteloube composed works in several different forms including chamber music, symphonic scores and songs. In 1925 he won the prestigious Prix Huegel for his Auvergne-inspired opera Le Mas, which was premiered in Paris four years later, and a second opera, Vercingétorix, followed in 1933. During the Second World War he published a four-volume Anthologie de chants populaires français. In 1941, Canteloube had joined the Vichy government where he worked to promote an interest in French folk music including through radio broadcasts. He also wrote for the monarchist/right-wing newspaper Action Française which would go on to be banned after the liberation of France in 1944. Despite his Vichy associations, which some ascribe to political naivety, he was not cast out after the war and in 1946 he even received a commission from the French government which resulted in his work Rustiques. Canteloube remains best known today for his Chants d’Auvergne, a collection of folk songs from his birthplace which he finally completed in 1955 – two years before his death and which proved enduringly popular. Listen to soprano Carolyn Sampson sing from Joseph Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergne.
Paul Dukas
Paul Dukas was a composer and music critic – and no one was more critical of his music than the Frenchman himself. This intense self-deprecation led to Dukas abandoning or destroying many of his compositions, leaving just a handful remaining as his legacy. Born in Paris in 1865, Dukas was influenced by a broad range of composers including Beethoven, Berlioz, d’Indy and Debussy. He studied at the city’s Conservatoire and won the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1888 with his cantata Velléda. Thanks to Walt Disney, his enchanting symphonic poem The Sorcerer’s Apprentice remains Dukas’ most famous and popular work. But the French composer, teacher (his students at the Conservatoire de Paris and the École Normale de Musique included Messiaen, Duruflé and Albeniz) and music critic also left a single symphony – composed between 1894 and 1896, an opera Ariane et Barbe-bleue, overture, piano sonata, variation set and an oriental ballet. The latter, the one-act La Péri (a péri being a fairy), described by Dukas himself as a "poème dansé", was composed in 1911 and would turn out to be his last major work. Despite living a further two decades, Dukas stopped publishing his work with one or two exceptions, including a piano piece in memory of Debussy. He died in Paris in 1935, and his ashes were interred at the city’s famous Père Lachaise cemetery. Did you know? Along with Dukas, other composers who count Père Lachaise as their final resting place include Chopin, Bizet, Poulenc, Enescu, Chausson, Cherubini and Rameau. When Rossini died in Paris in 1868, he was initially interred there but his remains were later removed to the Santa Croce Basilica in Florence. Listen to the allegro spiritoso from Paul Dukas’s Symphony in C.
About the Music
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937): Suite Ma mère l’Oye (Mother Goose Suite)
1. Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant (Sleeping Beauty’s Pavane) 2. Petit Poucet (Tom Thumb) 3. Laideronnette, impératrice des pagodes (Little Ugly, Empress of the Pagodas) 4. Les entretiens de la belle et de la bête (Beauty and the Beast) 5. Le jardin féerique (The Fairy Garden) Composed: 1910 (orchestrated 1911) First Performed (original piano duet version): 20 April 1910, Paris, Société musicale indépendante, Jeanne Leleu & Geneviève Durony (piano duet) Ravel was good with children. He never talked down to them, and he had an ability to enter their imaginative worlds effortlessly – some of his friends described him as ‘childlike’. None of his works show this more touchingly, or more poignantly, than Mother Goose. Poignantly? Well, let’s quote Mimi Godebski, one of the two gifted little siblings for whom Ravel wrote the original piano duet version: ‘There are few of my childhood memories in which Ravel does not find a place. Of all my parents’ friends I had a predilection for Ravel because he used to tell me stories that I loved. I used to climb on his knee and indefatigably he would begin, ‘Once upon a time…’ And it would be Laideronnette or ‘Beauty and the Beast’ or the adventures of a poor mouse that he made up for me. I used to laugh uproariously at these and then feel guilty, because they were really very sad.’ The five musical fairy-tales Ravel creates in his Mother Goose Suite are exquisite, in their magical colours and textures, and in the way they tell their stories. You can’t miss the moment when the Beast is transformed by Beauty’s love: a grotesque contrabassoon theme is transformed by a harp swirl into a sweetly beautiful solo violin melody. But some, like Mimi Godbeski, sense a strange sadness here too, especially in the final ‘Fairy Garden’. Is that because Ravel knows, deep in his ‘childlike’ soul, that such happy endings are impossible?
Joseph Canteloube (1879-1957): Songs of the Auvergne
Composed: 1923-30 First Performed: variety of performers/locations; first recording (11 selected songs) 1930, Madeleine Grey (soprano), cond. Élie Cohen The Auvergne is a particularly beautiful hilly and mountainous region almost central to France. Isolated by its geography to some extent until relatively recent times, it has developed its own distinctive culture, with its own dialect – or, some would say, language – Auvergnat, all reflected in its folk music. Joseph Canteloube was born in the Auvergne, and he developed a love for its folksongs and dances as a boy walking through the countryside with his father. His roots were so strong and so important to him that when he studied composition, he opted for a postal course so that he wouldn’t have to leave his beloved homelands. Canteloube’s fascination with Auvergnat folk music went way beyond ethnomusicology. It was contact with popular music, he believed, that would constantly renew and revitalise classical music – modern music, he felt, was in danger of losing that crucial contact with its primal roots. Thinking was important, but feeling was essential, and in his five books of arrangements of Auvergnat folk music he demonstrated that belief beautifully. The tune may be traditional, but Canteloube’s luscious, tangy arrangements are deliciously modern-romantic, and some of them – like the gorgeous ‘Baïlèro’ (‘The Shepherds Song’) - have become hugely popular. The name may be new to you, but some of the music almost certainly won’t be.
Paul Dukas (1865-1935): Symphony in C
1. Allegro non troppo vivace 2. Andante espressivo e sostenuto 3. Finale: Allegro spiritoso Composed: 1894-6 First Performed: 3 January 1897, Paris, Concerts de l’Opéra, cond. Paul Vidal Some composers have been described as ‘perfectionist’, but few took it to such extreme lengths as the Frenchman Paul Dukas. He composed a large amount of music, but only 14 works made it to the publisher, including one opera and one symphony. Another two ballets, a second symphony and five operas are known to have been completed and destroyed. We’re very lucky then that this remarkable symphony made it past Dukas’s super-strict internal censor. It’s a remarkably fresh, vigorous work, with catchy tunes and motifs, all imaginatively developed. Composing and hearing it no doubt helped Dukas find the confidence to create his best-known work, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (famous through the Disney animation Fantasia) the following year – and thank Heavens that didn’t share the fate of his other tone poem Le fil de parque (binned in 1908). The first movement has a lively swinging triple-time momentum, with a breezy out-of-doors atmosphere and one splendid memorable motif for all four horns in unison, heard later on. The slow movement is more inward-looking, delicate and tinged with melancholy, then the finale springs back into muscular action, the brightness enhanced by the addition of a high-pitched ‘piccolo’ trumpet – then just beginning to gain popularity with the revival of interest in baroque orchestral music. If shadows fell across the music in the central Andante, there are none here. You’d never guess that the man who wrote this joyous music could be so devastatingly hard on himself.