These are two works that made the OSR famous throughout the world thanks to its recordings. Ravel was skeptical when Ansermet suggested that he present L’Enfant et les sortilèges in concert, without the use of the stage. Time proved the conductor right, because the music is strong and imaginative enough for the listener to create its own mental staging. Ravel’s masterpiece celebrates childhood with its fears and unbridled dreams with a humor that is matched only by its tenderness, all presented as an operetta with accents of the American comedy that was beginning to sweep France.

Respighi is one of the rare Italian composers to have escaped the opera bug. Pini di Roma is his second symphonic poem dedicated to the Eternal City and probably the most successful thanks to a colorful allusion evoking atmospheres rather than precise descriptions.