Enigma Variations

For this concert, the conductor Marzena Diakun will lead the Dijon Bourgogne Orchestra along the musical paths of the English countryside. This is a landscape that is no longer always quite so bucolic these days, as witnessed in the first work on the programme. Charlotte Bray’s At the speed of stillnessowes its origins to the surprisingly dreamy contemplation of a building that is not immediately evocative: the Sizewell nuclear facility in Suffolk. Its apparent calm masking tremendous energy inspired the composer to write this piece, which plays on the paradoxical relations between movement, rest and their perception. The Enigma Variations, which turned Elgar overnight into a musical celebrity, owe their title to a double enigma: the first, today resolved, on the initials that precede each of the 14 variations and indicate the name of the person to whom it is dedicated, and the second, as yet unresolved, on its main theme, which forms the counterpoint of a famous melody that no one has yet been able to identify!