Concert Suite
on Le Petit Prince
after Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

An enchanting musical
fresco in nine movements.

When Kent Nagano commissioned Jean-Pascal Beintus, in 2007, to write a concert work for violin and harp inspired by Le Petit Prince, he was continuing a collaboration that had begun in Lyon during the 1990s. The Suite that emerged is not a literal illustration of Saint-Exupéry's tale but a journey: nine movements that follow the child through planets, encounters and farewells.

The violin — solitary, mobile, sometimes bare — embodies the voyage. The harp — territory of weightlessness, sky and water — provides the poetic backdrop. The chamber orchestra becomes landscape: now a hurried businessman, now a mineral desert, now the garden where the fox is tamed. Beintus achieves here a rare balance between narration and pure music, faithful to what one loves about his writing: a luminous melancholy, a cinematic orchestration without grandiloquence.

L'œuvre est créée à Berlin en 2008 par le Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester sous la direction de Kent Nagano.

Two recordings currently exist: Alexandra Conunova (violin), Bryn Lewis (harp) and the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Quentin Hindley — an album recorded at Abbey Road for 21 Music; and Eva-Christina Schönweiss (violin), Kirsten Ecke (harp) and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin conducted by Kent Nagano for Capriccio.

This score is a concert work that is narrative, accessible to family audiences without compromise on the writing, and technically demanding. The violin writing is particularly idiomatic for the instrument. The Concert Suite on Le Petit Prince after Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is today one of the composer's greatest successes, with numerous performances every year.

// The nine movements

Two reference interpretations.