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Elsa Barraine: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 2 'Voïna'

20262173255519Orchestra & Symphony

French composer Elsa Barraine (1910–99) was a pupil of Paul Dukas and fellow student of Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire. She won the Prix de Rome at age 19, before going on to hold several public posts in French music. She spent more than 20 years as a professor and was also prominent in the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation years of World War Two. Led by music director Cristian Măcelaru, the French National Orchestra presents four works by Barraine: Symphony No. 1 (1931), which she completed in Italy; Symphony No. 2 (1938), ominously subtitled “Voïna,” the French transliteration of the Russian word for war; Les Tziganes (1959), a work inspired by Romani culture; and Song-Koï (Le fleuve rouge) (1945), an eight-movement evocation of the Red River that flows through Vietnam, composed in the year that the nation declared its independence from France.

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