Orchestral works (2026)

"All of the thirteen purely orchestral works here were originally published as piano pieces, hence the disparate opus numbers. Not all were orchestrated by Bonis, and it is thought that she never heard any of her music performed in its orchestral form. The majority are dances, and they are all relatively short – Le Songe de Cléopâtre at eight minutes is the longest by some way. None of them has much depth – Cléopâtre goes closest – and the result is a series of pretty works that don’t really grab the attention. Over the period of almost twenty years, Bonis wrote a set of piano pieces titled Femmes de légende, and from these, she chose three to orchestrate, under the banner of Trois femmes de légende. Each is relatively brief and contrasting: Le Songe de Cléopâtre has a Tchaikovskyian feel to it, Ophélie has obvious impressionistic sensibilities and Salomé, written two years after Strauss’s opera premiered in Paris, has an oriental feel, and made me think of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade." (Music Web Int.)

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