In just a few weeks, Bizet fashioned 27 musical numbers to introduce, intensify or gently underscore scenes in the play. Daudet loved the results and, like the composer, felt confident that the premiere on Oct. 1, 1872 at the Théâtre du Vaudeville in Paris would be a triumph. No such luck. Audience members made more noise than the orchestra, happily chatting over the music or yelling insults at the stage when they weren’t slamming doors on their way out. The production soon closed and the play faded into the fringes of the repertory. But Bizet’s contribution enjoyed a second act. He fashioned a suite of four extracts from his L’Arlésienne score, beefing up the orchestration and dropping the original choral parts. The music found instant favor with the public a month after the play’s ill-fated opening. A second four-part suite, arranged by composer Ernest Guiraud after Bizet’s death and retaining the same vivid orchestration of the first, proved equally popular.

The NSO will perform a reshuffling of three items from each suite. This sampling begins with the Pastorale from Suite No. 2, which evokes a grand processional that gradually gives way to a folksy, syncopated dance percolating with woodwind flurries before the stately material resumes. The ensuing selection from Suite No. 2 represents a nervy case of poetic license on Guiraud’s part. Instead of choosing something from the original L’Arlésienne score, the intrepid arranger extracted a Menuet from an 1866 opera by Bizet, La jolie fille de Perth (The Fair Maid of Perth). Accompanied by harp, a flute spins an elegantly twirling melody that eventually engages in a graceful dialogue with saxophone.

Next up are three excerpts from Suite No. 1. In the Carillon, horns imitate the pealing of bells with a persistent three-note motive, while the strings lead the rest of the orchestra in a spirited dance very much in the spirit of Provencal folk music. The pace slows for plaintive musings before the horns slyly chime in with their bell theme to spark a buoyant return of the opening material.
A colorful Menuet finds strings and winds in a perky conversation that returns, soft and condensed, at the end of the movement. In between those passages comes a beguiling country dance that, with woodwinds whirling around a sumptuous lyrical theme in the violins, would be right at home in a Tchaikovsky ballet. To underscore a scene where two minor characters in Daudet’s play reflect on their long-ago love affair, Bizet wrote a poignant Adagietto for strings that builds gently to a melodic and emotional peak, then recedes to a tranquil close. (That arc seems to prefigure another radiant, string-fueled Adagietto in the same F major key — the fourth movement of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5.)


Then it’s back to Suite No. 2 for the Farandole fashioned by Guiraud out of two numbers from the original L’Arlésienne score that make use of authentic Provençal tunes, the minor-key carol Marcho dei Rei (“March of the Kings”) and, punctuated here by tambourine, the Danse dei Chivau-Frus (“Dance of the Frisky Horses”). The two melodies get trotted out separately before galloping one atop the other in a flourish of frenetic counterpoint. It’s at least easier to forgive anything Guiraud ever did with, or to, Bizet’s music (even the soggy recitatives he stuck into Carmen after the composer died) whenever this irresistible Farandole heads to the finish line.

A year before the shadow of COVID-19 fell across the globe, Negrón chose the title for a new work from a poem by 20th-century Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik, En otra noche, en otro mundo (“On another night, in another world”). The composer didn’t have specific musical ideas in mind at that point, just a sense that the work would reflect her own frequent longing to be in a different time and place. That yearning only intensified in 2020 as she composed the score, which now suggests more of a universal statement than just a personal one, capturing what many people have experienced throughout the viral crisis. “It is impossible to detach myself from the context in which the piece was written,” Negrón says, “especially since what was happening was of such immense magnitude. It definitely would have been a different piece if there hadn’t been a pandemic.”

Aware that the work’s premiere in Dallas would be under physically distanced restrictions, Negrón wrote for Beethoven-sized, rather than Mahlerian, orchestral forces. (An organ and MIDI keyboard supplement the instrumentation.) “I might dream up ideas for expanding the score one day,” the composer says, “but it does feel really as though it was meant to be this way.”

Over the course of about 16 minutes, Negrón coaxes the listener into a sensitively layered soundscape. Above the first measure on the printed score of En otra noche, en otro mundo, she offers this provocative indication to conductor and players: “Distant, yet strangely familiar.” The piece begins by focusing on a single note that generates reiterative pulsations when articulated in octaves by the harp and reinforced by vibraphone. The sound of breaths passing through flutes and the delicate bell tones of crotales add to the expectant atmosphere. Bit by bit, more instruments and colors emerge, as does an organic melodic idea — a slow, descending scale — that provides a unifying thread throughout the piece.

The pace and tension gradually quicken, spurred by series of repeated notes in the brass, and flecked by short, upward thrusts in the woodwinds. An angular theme emerges to fortify this propulsive passage, before the mood turns “slower, hazy” (the composer’s indication in the score). Chordal waves from the horns mingle with eerie sliding in the strings; a new round of breathy input comes from flutes; and bright percussive punctuation contrasts with soft, steady, reiterative motives in the violins and violas. All of this produces a strange sense of moving while standing still, or, to quote Negrón’s instruction in the score, “Like you’re reaching for something unattainable.” Gradually, the descending theme reappears, stately at first, then faster, firmer, before the sounds of the harp’s octave patterns from the opening of the score lead to a hushed close.

En otra noche, en otro mundo suggests “a state of mind,” the composer says, “a place where there are no worries, where one is present and feels full, a place with some calmness to it.” It’s a place you may feel reluctant to leave.

When all was said and written after opening night, the choreography earned modest marks, at most. The music, however, soon eclipsed its original context. Best known in the form of two orchestral suites that Ravel drew from the score (Suite No. 2, in particular, is a repertoire standard), the complete Daphnis et Chloé has enjoyed a good deal of attention in recent decades. For this week’s NSO performances, conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier has removed some passages that he considers less effective in a concert setting (the part for wordless chorus in the original version is also omitted).

Ravel, who described this masterwork as “a choreographic symphony in three movements,” employs massive orchestral forces, but uses them with uncanny transparency and refinement to delineate the ballet’s plot in richly atmospheric detail. Part One of that plot starts in a grotto to the sounds of expectant harmonies moving upward by fifths. From this sonic mist, two important thematic ideas emerge that hold the whole piece together — a back-and-forth pattern of two notes (long, short, long, short, long); and a more melodic theme, its undulating shape gaining expressive tension with each rise and fall to evoke the love of Daphnis and Chloé.

The couple join a group in a solemn processional to pay respects at the statues of three Nymphs who serve the god Pan. A jaunty, trumpet-led dance sequence breaks out when Daphnis becomes surrounded by admiring maidens, leading a jealous Chloé to join a group of men for an almost-waltz (in 7/4 time). After the gruff Dorcon, announced by bassoons and drum, makes advances on Chloé, a dance contest is suggested, with a kiss from her as the prize. Dorcon’s crude moves (depicted by low brass) fail to please (woodwinds provide the crowd’s guffaws). The contrasting elegance of Daphnis, reflected in diaphanous curls and swirls from the orchestra and a radiant statement of the lovers’ theme, makes clear who wins.

Amid dark rumblings and interjections from trumpets and percussion, pirates swoop in to snatch Chloé, leaving Daphnis distraught. A hushed, tremulous passage, flecked with flute, horn and clarinet solos, depicts the statues of the Nymphs come to life one by one, joined, with the whoosh of a wind machine, by Pan himself, ready to save the day.
Part Two, set at the pirates’ camp, is spiced by a war dance punctuated with spiky rhythms and brassy outbursts that could easily fit into an Igor Stravinsky ballet score. When Chloé is forced to dance for the pirate chief, the music’s aching lyricism expresses her plight. Slithering strings reveal the approach of Pan and his helpers, whose arrival unleashes orchestral firepower and sets the pirates fleeing.

The scene dissolves into Part Three, set back at the grotto, where dawn begins to break, an image perfectly conjured by Ravel’s exquisite tone-painting. Birds chirp (woodwind and violin solos) and a rising motion in the strings reflects the sun’s lengthening rays. The reunion of Daphnis and Chloé is marked by a series of orchestral climaxes that make full use of their theme. An old shepherd (oboe solo) advises the happy couple to honor their divine rescuer by dancing the story of Pan’s fateful love for the nymph Syrinx (a sensual flute solo enhances this ballet-within-the-ballet). After Daphnis and Chloé fall into each other’s arms amid a luxuriant treatment of their leitmotiv, flashes from woodwinds and percussion ignite a bacchanal in a hypnotic 5/4 rhythm that sweeps up everyone in a rush of Ravelian rapture.