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Ravel said that this work ‘evokes birds lost in the torpor of a very dark forest at the hottest time of summer’.

Ravel’s Miroirs (‘Mirrors’) is a set of five Impressionistic piano pieces each dedicated to one of the composer’s friends in the group of artists known as ‘Les apaches’. The earliest of the set to be written, though it was eventually placed second in the published order, was this piece - ‘Oiseaux tristes’ (Sorrowful Birds), dedicated to the Spanish pianist Ricardo Viñes. Although Ravel described ‘Oiseaux tristes’ as ‘not in the least pianistic’, he never made an orchestration of the work.

This is the world premiere of an arrangement of 'Oiseaux tristes' by British composer Colin Matthews.