New Year’s Waltzes

Alain Altinoglu

Romantic, tender, nostalgic, dangerous or sensual, the waltz can take on a palette of very different colours without ever altering its instantly recognizable rhythm. Alain Altinoglu and the La Monnaie Symphony Orchestra invite you to discover all its facets in a festive concert.    

In his operetta Die Fledermaus, Johann Strauss II uses dance as a genuine theatrical ingredient. Waltzes, polkas, mazurkas and czardas fuel the misunderstandings in this burlesque comedy, whose overture brings together the most emblematic passages. Another opera by another Strauss, Der Rosenkavalier, pays a humorous tribute to the waltz, blending jubilation, melancholy and introspection. All these nuances are preserved in the orchestral suites with which Richard Strauss extended the incredible success of his opera in concert form. The innocence and lightness associated with this dance soon became obsolete after World War I. In his La Valse, Maurice Ravel evokes not only the beauty of that bygone era, but also the decline and eventual collapse of Europe, with an energy that is both rousing and devastating. Ravel himself described the work as ‘a kind of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, with, in my mind, the impression of a fantastic and fatal whirlwind’.