Pia Bose (MM ’01, Piano), member of the Bose-Pastor Duo, co-created 3/4, an interdisciplinary project that reimagines Maurice Ravel’s La Valse (trans. by Lucien Garban) through the previously unexplored lens of Edgar Allan Poe. Developed in collaboration with choreographer Julio Arozarena and video artist Baptiste Leydecker, 3/4 combines piano four-hands, dance, and visual media to interpret La Valse as a complex psychological portrait of beauty unraveling amid disintegration. Drawing on Ravel’s documented admiration for Poe’s methodical compositional philosophy and the gothic allegory of The Masque of the Red Death, the project explores the unsettling duality of elegance and catastrophe, presenting La Valse as a dance on the edge of destruction, where grace and dread coexist in a haunting, feverish whirl. By envisioning La Valse through Poe’s aesthetic of terror and cumulative effect, 3/4 offers a profound meditation on fragility, illusion, and the human condition—a twentieth-century vision of collapse that feels disturbingly relevant in today’s world.
The Bose-Pastor Duo launched 3/4 in honor of the 150th anniversary of Maurice Ravel ‘s birth and will feature La Valse in their program 4 mains dansent Ravel at L’été musical en Bergerac – Festival du Périgord Pourpre (August 5) and L’Esplanade du Lac in Divonne-les-Bains (October 7) in France, as well as at other venues in Switzerland, where the duo is based.