They call it the Belle Époque-in the early years of the 20th century, the French capital became a magnet for creatives, including Pablo Picasso, Claude Debussy, Gertrude Stein, Henri Matisse, and Marcel Proust. Steeped in that world, two friends, Igor Stravinsky and Maurice Ravel, combined lush harmonies with scintillating orchestral colors to become giants of modern music. Ravel tapped into his Spanish roots for his lusty and bombastic Alborada del gracioso, contrasted here with his delicate nod to the French Baroque. Closing the 2023/24 season, Maestro Stutzmann conducts Stravinsky's watershed ballet, The Firebird, a titanic and lustrous dazzler in the hands of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. The program pairs these works with one of the great monuments for solo violin, the Beethoven Violin Concerto featuring the much-anticipated return of the German violin virtuoso Veronika Eberle, who wowed Atlanta audiences in 2018 with her "totally on fire" (ArtsATL) performance of Brahms.
