Scheherazade

A sultan who executes each wife at dawn is delayed a thousand and one nights by a woman telling stories, and Rimsky-Korsakov gives her a solo violin that returns between the sea, the prince and the shipwreck. The whole suite is an argument that narrative is a survival tactic. Before it, Dora Pejačević's overture opens the evening and Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto follows — the work he wrote after a physician named Dahl treated the three-year block that the failure of his First Symphony had left him with, and to whom he dedicated it.