Sheffield Chamber Orchestra gratefully acknowledges particular support from one of our Friends for our Young Soloists at our Accent on Youth Summer Concert. We very much appreciate this contribution which is aimed at encouraging young, talented musicians from the area by enabling them to perform with an orchestra.

Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, translated as The Bourgeois Gentleman, The Middle-Class Aristocrat, or The Would-Be Noble) is a five-act comedy ballet, a play intermingled with music, dance and singing – written by Molière, first presented on 14 October 1670 before the court of Louis XIV at the Châteaux of Chambord by Molière's troupe of actors. The music was composed by in 1670 by Lully and choreographed by Pierre Beauchamp.

Saint-Saëns composed his Cello Concerto No. 1 in 1872 for the eminent Belgian cellist Auguste Tolbecque, who performed the premiere at a Paris Conservatoire concert in January 1873. Since then, it has attained significant status within the cello repertoire, alongside the earlier cello concertos of Joseph Haydn and Robert Schumann, and the later ones by Edward Elgar and Antonín Dvořák. Long admired by many composers, it also remains one of the French composer’s most popular works. Its appeal, along with much of Saint-Saëns’s music, is well summed up by the French writer Romain Rolland, who penned in 1908, “His music strikes us by its calm, its tranquil harmonies, its velvety modulations, its crystal clearness, its smooth and flowing style, and an elegance that cannot be put into words.”

Ravel originally composed his Pavane pour une infant défunte for piano in 1899 when he was studying with Fauré. The title does not refer to a specific infant princess but rather the piece is an evocation of the music and customs of a bygone age; a dance that a young Spanish princess would have enjoyed. Ravel also said that the piece depicted a pavane as it would be danced by an infanta found in a painting by Velazquez.

Five years after Les Animaux modèles in June 1947, Poulenc wrote to Darius Milhaud that he was about to embark on a Sinfonietta for the BBC Third Programme, who commissioned an orchestral piece as part of its tenth anniversary. Premiered on 24 October 1948 by the Philharmonia Orchestra under Roger Désormière, the Sinfonietta is in some ways a rather atypical work to come from a composer primarily known for elegant, witty songs and piano miniatures.