When we gather in a concert hall today, it’s tempting to take for granted that orchestral music has always sounded the way it does. We expect it to move us, to stir something deep, but not always to tell a story. In 1830, however, the young French composer, Hector Berlioz, broke through those expectations with a work so daring, so vividly cinematic, that critics didn’t even have the words for it.
Composer Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) was a master of color and clarity—equally at home with intimate chamber textures and orchestral shimmer. Explore the program below with notes and embedded listening.
When we began the journey to reimagine our organization as Live Arts Toledo, we knew we needed more than a new name and logo. We needed a unifying story—something that would carry meaning not only in our performance halls and classrooms, but in the hearts of everyone who calls this organization their own.
Composer and pianist Maurice Ravel is most commonly associated with the French Impressionist movement, along with his contemporary, Claude Debussy, though neither acknowledged the label. Ravel was raised in a musical household and had access to an excellent musical education at the Paris Conservatory, where he decided against a career as a concert pianist and opted to devote his life to composing.
When you sit in The Peristyle as the symphony tunes, when you watch a dancer balance on the edge of silence just before the music begins, when you feel a jazz trio lift the room, you know there is nothing else like live performance. It is profoundly human. It exists in that fleeting, unrepeatable moment, felt as deeply by the people who perform as by the people who witness it.
This is the essence of what we do. And now, it is the name we carry: Live Arts Toledo.
