An Evening With Steven Isserlis - Sheffield Chamber Music Festival 2024

N BOULANGER Three pieces for cello and piano (8’)
DEBUSSY Cello Sonata (12’)
RAVEL Sonata for violin and cello (20’)
R SCHUMANN (arr. Isserlis) Violin Concerto (mvt 2) (12’)
R SCHUMANN Ghost Variations for piano (12’)
FAURÉ Piano Trio (21’)

Three acclaimed musicians and frequent collaborators perform music they adore. This thoughtfully crafted programme celebrates the musical loves and legacy of the French composer, Gabriel Fauré.

Highlights include our Guest Curator’s arrangement of a movement from Schumann’s beloved Violin Concerto, which shares a theme with the delicate and haunting ‘Ghost Variations’ for piano; the final work by one of the giants of Romantic music. Fauré’s miraculous Piano Trio, his penultimate work, radiates ecstatic joy to conclude what promises to be a very special evening of music.

Note from Guest Curator, Steven Isserlis

“Schumann’s Geister Variations for piano have a tragic history: they were effectively his final work,
written in the last days before he was taken to the asylum where he was to spend his remaining years. He believed that the spirits of Schubert and Mendelssohn, surrounded by angels, had appeared to him in a dream and dictated the theme; he seems never to have realised that he had actually composed the theme earlier, as the violin’s main melody in the slow movement of his violin concerto (as well as another, much earlier, version in a ‘song for the young’). The variations really seem to be his farewell to life. Fauré’s Piano Trio, although his penultimate work, is quite different, pulsing with ecstatic energy from its opening bars; the slow movement is simply breathtaking – I know nothing like it in the whole of music. For me, this is one of Fauré’s very greatest works.”