A Hero’s Life and Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G

Flint Symphony Orchestra

Enrique Diemecke music director and conductor
Marika Bournaki piano

Program:
Maurice Ravel Piano Concerto in G major
Richard Strauss Ein Heldenleben, Op. 40 (“A Hero’s Life”)

Imagine music as a mirror – what might one see in its reflection? For Strauss, he saw a hero as reflected in his unabashedly autobiographical and self-congratulatory tone-poem, Ein Heldenleben. For Ravel, who grew up in the culturally eclectic Basque region of France, his musical reflection revealed a fusion of cultural and modern influences that shaped his unique voice.

Pianist Marika Bournaki, hailed as “the Celine Dion of classical music,” will illuminate that fusion of cultures in Ravel’s Piano Concerto, which blends American jazz rhythms with colorful Spanish traditions of the Basques.