(Red Deer Symphony Orchestra)

By Josh Hall (Twitter: @Vancan19)

pièce de résistance

Red Deer Symphony Orchestra returns this Saturday with season’s third show — ‘Suite Francaise’

Jan 11, 2023 | 9:13 AM

The Red Deer Symphony Orchestra (RDSO) continues its stupendous return season this Saturday at the Red Deer Polytechnic Arts Centre.

RDSO presents Main Series Concert 3 – ‘Suite Francaise’, led as usual by Music Director Claude Lapalme, and joined by ‘virtuosic saxophonist’ Chee Meng Low as the evening’s guest soloist.

Tickets are still available at rdptickets.universitytickets.com.

“Attendees are going to experience the typical French sounds from the period of roughly the 1920s. At that point in time, there are several things that happened, one of them being that some French composers were taking a look back at music written in France hundreds of years before,” explains Lapalme.

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(Red Deer Symphony Orchestra)

“They were also looking to the music made by a large influx of American musicians who post-war decided to stay in Paris. A lot of them were jazz musicians and singers who became extremely popular. The Parisian music scene was exposed to a new type of popular music it had never heard before.”

Lapalme says much of said music had already been heard in the United States south and in Chicago.

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“It’s arguable that the French, or more specifically Parisians, were the first to really hail that music as an art form,” he says. “In this program, the Francis Poulenc piece is a reorchestration or rearrangement of early medieval dances written in France in the 16th century, and it’s put with modern sounds and instruments, such as trumpets, trombones, oboes, bassoons, and given a modern flavour.”

Another portion of the overall arrangement will feature Darius Milhaud’s jazz-inspired La creation du monde, and then Low with Jaques Ibert’s Concertino da Camera.

For more information and a full RDSO schedule, visit rdso.ca.