The 1920s went down in music history as the “Jazz Age”. After a voyage to North America, Darius Milhaud composed La Création du monde (“The Creation of the World”): a ballet score in which the 30-year-old Frenchman combined his enthusiasm for jazz and the blues with his love for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Almost at the same time, 25-year-old George Gershwin was writing Rhapsody in Blue, a work that laid the foundation for his worldwide fame and paved the way for jazz into the concert hall. At this year’s final concert of the Ruhr Piano Festival you can now hear these two fascinating pieces in an exceptional, unaccustomed performance. Two outstanding pianists of the young generation are at the pianos: Fabian Müller and Lorenzo Soulès. They play as a duo in Rachmaninov and Gershwin, but for La Création du monde they are joined onstage by pupils from several schools in Duisburg-Marxloh, who, as part of a dance and music project overseen by the Festival’s Education Department, have developed their own choreography.