Perfect Love, Doomed Love
Donald Macleod focuses on a failed collaboration, a professorship and Faure making his mark in London.
Donald Macleod follows the dramatic thread running through Gabriel Fauré's musical output. Today, a failed collaboration; a professorship; and Fauré makes his mark in London.
A 25,000-franc commission to create a music drama for the inauguration of a wealthy heiress's magnificent new music room, with one of the century's most celebrated poets as your librettist - what could possibly go wrong? In the event, the project barely got off the starting-blocks. Despite the good offices of the Princesse de Polignac - a.k.a. Winnaretta Singer, heiress to the sewing-machine fortune - Fauré couldn't even agree on a subject with the eminent but ailing Paul Verlaine. So no collaboration, but Fauré did go on to set some of Verlaine's poetry to music - his song-cycle La bonne chanson, which charts the course of a perfect, immutable love, being a marvellous example. Love of the doomed, catastrophic kind was the subject-matter of Maurice Maeterlinck's play Pelléas et Mélisande, and it drew from Fauré some of his most touching music, commissioned for a London production in 1898.
Sérénade du Bourgeois Gentilhomme ('Je languis nuit et jour')
Gérard Souzay, baritone
Dalton Baldwin, piano
La bonne chanson, Op 61
Karine Deshayes, mezzo-soprano
Ensemble Contraste
Fantaisie for flute and piano, Op 79
Michel Debost, flute
Jean-Philippe Collard, piano
Pélleas et Mélisande - Suite, Op 80
Jill Gomez, soprano
Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra
David Zinman, conductor
Producer: Chris Barstow.
Last on
Music Played
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Gabriel Fauré
Serenade du bourgeois gentilhomme
Performer: Dalton Baldwin. Singer: Gérard Souzay.- BRILLIANT : 92792.
- BRILLIANT.
- 30.
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Gabriel Fauré
La Bonne chanson Op.61
Performer: Karine Deshayes. Performer: Ensemble Contraste.- ZIGZAG: ZZT110302.
- ZIGZAG.
- ZZT110302.
- 5.
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Gabriel Fauré
Fantaisie Op.79
Performer: Michel Debost. Performer: Jean‐Philippe Collard.- EMI:336126 2.
- EMI.
- 5.
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Gabriel Fauré
Pelleas et Melisande - suite Op.80
Singer: Jill Gomez. Orchestra: Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra. Conductor: David Zinman.- PHILIPS : 446-201-2.
- PHILIPS.
- 9.
Broadcasts
- Tue 22 Nov 201612:00BBC Radio 3
- Tue 22 Nov 201618:30BBC Radio 3
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