Dudamel Leads a Premiere by a Youthful Ravel. Not Bad for a Kid.

It’s not every day that a critic gets to review a premiere by Ravel.

He died almost a century ago, after all. And while some previously unknown works have come to light over the years, it happens considerably less than once in a blue moon.

So my pen was out and alert on Thursday at the New York Philharmonic’s delightful concert at David Geffen Hall, practically vibrating with the opportunity to be among the first to weigh in on a piece by the creator of some of music’s most enduring and gorgeous classics.

The work that the Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel, its incoming music director, were playing, part of a program celebrating Ravel’s 150th birthday, was long assumed to be lost. Written around 1900, when Ravel was still a conservatory student stormily at odds with the musical establishment, the score for selections from a cantata called “Sémiramis” turned up at an auction in 2000, when it entered the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

An entry in the diary of one of the composer’s friends, the pianist Ricardo Viñes, indicates that it was played, probably as a class exercise, in 1902. (“It is very beautiful,” Viñes wrote.) There’s no record of it being performed in public between then and Thursday.

Grave and gloomy, bronzed by the low luster of a gong, the first section rises to the dramatic punch of an opera overture. The music then accelerates into a gaudy Orientalist dance that looks back to the Bacchanale from Saint-Saëns’s “Samson et Dalila” and the “Polovtsian Dances” of Borodin, one of the Russian masters Ravel adored.