Claire Levacher conduct Music College Winterthur with pianist Claire Huangci

"City of Love" hardly does justice to the complexity of the cultural metropolis of Paris. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the metropolis, with its concentration of great artists, was a good starting point for anyone trying to be in the right place at the right time. Unfortunately, Emmanuel Chabrier never managed this; quite the contrary: his opera "Le roi malgré lui" was largely plagued by bad luck – the Opéra-Comique in Paris burned down a week after its premiere, and Chabrier's opera never truly gained recognition. Only the "Fête polonaise," performed here, quickly found its way into the repertoire in its orchestral version. The contrasting example is Igor Stravinsky's "The Firebird," for even the first performance sent shockwaves throughout Paris, something not even the Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who commissioned the work, had anticipated. After all, the unknown Stravinsky was neither his first nor his second choice. A stroke of genius on Diaghilev's part, then, and exactly what the Parisian audience was looking for. Others, like Sergei Prokofiev, had to take a circuitous route before encountering a favorable response. In Chicago, Prokofiev's powerful touch and the unfamiliar harmonies of his Third Piano Concerto left the concert hall largely unmoved. Quite different in Paris: his performance was a resounding success, and artists like Maurice Ravel marveled at his compositional and pianistic artistry. Prokofiev had found his city in Paris, even if this meant emigration from his longed-for homeland.