A French composer of chamber and orchestral music, opera, and ballet. Lalo is most famous for his Symphonie espagnole (1875), the brilliant and colorful prototype of French impressionism, which used Spain as its subject in such pieces as Chabrier's España and Debussy's Iberia. But the real genius of Lalo lies both in his extraordinary, wholly original orchestration -- which anticipated many of the most beautiful scores of the impressionists (the teenage Debussy was in fact among the audience for the ballet Namouna and had to be ejected from the house for defending it to a partially hostile audience) -- and in his synthesis of Wagnerian harmony and French melodic grace in such works as his masterpiece, the opera Le Roi d'Ys (based on an ancient Breton story), and in Namouna. ~ Blue Gene Tyranny, Rovi