Faure

Fauré’s Cello Sonata No. 1 in D Minor: “The Power of Tranquil Thought”

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Gabriel Fauré’s Cello Sonata No. 1 in D minor, Op. 109 inhabits a world of elegance and dreamy nostalgia. It is music characterized by soft edges, buoyant motion, and an effortless sense of melody. Composed in the summer of 1917, this is one of two cello sonatas Fauré completed in the final decade of his life. During these years, Fauré, who served as the head of the Paris Conservatoire until 1920, continued to compose despite …

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Violinist María Dueñas: Three Recordings

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María Dueñas, the exceptional 20-year-old Spanish violinist, was our guest soloist at the Richmond Symphony last weekend. She performed Édouard Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole. Dueñas was the first prize winner in the 2021 Menuhin Violin Competition, which was hosted in Richmond. In 2022, she signed an exclusive recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon. She performs on the 1736 “Muntz” Guarneri del Gesú violin. Paganini: Caprice No. 4 The fourth of Niccolò Paganini’s Twenty Four Caprices …

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Fauré’s “Pelléas et Mélisande” Suite: Incidental Music for a Symbolist Play

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Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1898 French symbolist play, Pelléas and Mélisande, centers around a doomed love triangle. Set in an ancient ruined castle and a dense forest, it “expresses a sense that human beings understand neither themselves nor each other nor the world.” (Bettina Knapp) Joan Pataky Kosove writes, Pelléas et Mélisande tells the story of a young and beautiful girl who marries one man, falls in love with another, and dies. But the play …

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Fauré’s Piano Quartet No. 1 in C Minor: Color and Motion

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Gabriel Fauré’s Piano Quartet No. 1 in C minor, Op. 15 inhabits a magical world of shimmering colors and buoyant, effortless motion. Amid the emotional excesses of nineteenth century Romanticism, this is music made up of pristine lines and classical elegance. It unfolds with a sublime simplicity and directness. Its expression arises from a kind of emotional detachment. Set in the sunniest and most blissful C minor imaginable, undercurrents of quiet lament …

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Fauré’s Berceuse, Op. 16: Christian Ferras

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A berceuse is a “cradle song,” set in a gently rocking 6/8 meter. Gabriel Fauré composed the beautiful and fleeting Berceuse, Op. 16 for violin and piano about 1879. This remastered performance by the French violinist Christian Ferras and pianist Ernest Lush was released in 1951. Born in 1933, Christian Ferras was one of the greatest exponents of the elegant, sonically colorful Franco-Belgian school of violin playing. Illness led to his early and tragic death in …

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“Le Secret”: Fauré’s Mystical Art Song

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Throughout Gabriel Fauré’s 1879 song, Le Secret, serene, hypnotically repeating chords in the piano toll like an immortal bell. We drift into a detached dreamscape which seems to anticipate the final, time-altering movement of Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time.  The song’s text is a setting of Paul-Armand Silvestre’s poem, Mystère, from the collection, Le pays des roses (1882). Its three stanzas blur the lines between dawn, day, and night. A sense of transcendental mystery is …

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Fauré and Debussy: Two Charming Settings of Paul Verlaine’s “Mandoline”

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Gabriel Fauré’s 1891 song cycle, Cinq mélodies “de Venise”, Op. 58, begins with music which is as charming and infectious as it is brief. Mandoline is a setting of a poem from the 1869 collection, Fêtes galantes, by the French Symbolist, Paul Verlaine. The poem was inspired by a series of paintings by Jean-Antoine Watteau depicting (as Robert Gartside writes) “18th century nobility in their fêtes champètres, those elegant picnics redolent of a mixture of gaiety, …

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