The world premiere includes both the “Prélude et Danse” and the “Scene I — Air de Manassès”, an aria for tenor, orchestra, and choir that had never before been heard publicly. This discovery is crucial in Ravelian musicology, as the composer left a relatively small catalog of about eighty works.
“"Viñes had an obsessive personality who kept everything. The two main collections of Viñes, the Lleida Municipal Archive and the University of Lleida, gather more than 10,000 documents."
The manuscript of Sémiramis was located in 2000 at an auction of documents from Ravel's home and acquired by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, but it had remained largely unexplored for two decades. The premiere coincides with the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the birth of both Ravel and Viñes.
Musically, the work shows a young Ravel, influenced by the Russian Orientalism of composers like Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin, as well as his teacher Gabriel Fauré. The work is now definitively incorporated into the French composer's musical corpus, reaffirming Ricard Viñes' central role as a privileged witness to the cultural life of his time.
