A Weekend in Paris: The Salon and The Masquerade

Salons were the cultural and intellectual hub of Paris; open forums for the city’s most creative minds to engage in thought-provoking and often subversive conversations. These events, along with the famed Masquerade balls, were rife with stirring and seductive new ideas, art, literature, and music. The pieces on this program emerged from these glamorous salons and range from the charming piano duo by Debussy and Sarasate’s devilishly virtuosic Carmen Fantasy, to Ravel and Caplet’s decadent and macabre evocations of Edgar Allan’s Poe’s story The Masque of the Red Death.