This afternoon’s concert opens with music from first Roussel's ballet, Le Festin de l'araignée (The Spider's Banquet). Depicting insect life in a garden, Roussel's principal character, a spider, is joined by a butterfly, ants, praying mantises and dung beetles in a pantomime-like story of life and death.
Soprano Katriens Baerts presents Claude Vivier’s profoundly moving Lonely Child. Vivier conceived the piece as a single melody, with the orchestra creating ‘great beams of colour’.
Three short tone poems follow, first Honegger's Pacific 231, portraying a steam train moving off and getting up to full speed, before Holst’s Egdon Heath, a homage to the great Thomas Hardy and his Wessex moors.
To end, there’s Dukas’s spellbinding The Sorcerer's Apprentice, first encountered by many through the Walt Disney animated film, Fantasia, released in 1940.