Aziz Shokhakimov conducts Ravel, Elgar, and Tchaikovsky

The superb Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra and their music director Aziz Shokhakimov open this stirring program with Le Tombeau de Couperin, Ravel's World War I-era masterpiece that pays tribute to Ravel's friends lost during the war not with a somber dirge, but with lighthearted Baroque elegance and colorful neoclassical harmonies: "The dead are sad enough," Ravel said, "in their eternal silence." To close the evening, Shokhakimov and the OPS answer the knock of fate in Tchaikovsky's poignantly autobiographical Fourth Symphony, which breaks with formal conventions to foreground emotional truth.