WRE SALON | Chopin and Franck
This concert gains a special resonance from soloist, Alice Power, 2025 laureate of the Prix Cortot of the École Normale de Musique de Paris. Honouring Alfred Cortot—legendary pianist, editor and teacher, and co-founder of the École—the prize places Alice within a lineage in which Chopin and Franck are touchstones. Cortot himself studied piano in Paris with Chopin pupil Émile Decombes and is widely considered to be one of the composer's finest interpreters, whilst his performances of Franck with violinist Jacques Thibaud are legendary for their supple phrasing and helped cement the sonata's place in the repertoire. This concert’s pairing mirrors Cortot’s own artistic world: the intimacy of Chopin heard at chamber scale, and the poetic architecture of the Franco-Belgian tradition at its peak.
Chopin’s Piano Concerto no 2 in F minor appears here in the original scoring for string quintet, a salon-scale medium Chopin himself favoured, and one that Cortot prized for its clarity and conversational give-and-take (although he himself produced an orchestration and famously recorded it with the London Symphony Orchestra and Barbirolli in 1935). In this chamber guise the concerto speaks with heightened intimacy: the strings are true partners in dialogue with the piano—exactly the sort of close-quarters eloquence that Cortot’s legacy celebrates.
PROGRAMME
FRANCK: Violin Sonata (1886)
CHOPIN: Piano Concerto no 2 (1829), original chamber version
Alice Power | piano
David Milsom | violin
WRE Quintet | David Milsom & Maria Nikolaeva, violin; Charlotte Kenyon, viola; Perris Heath, cello; Lucas Jordan, double bass
Prices
£20 (full); £15 (concession); £0 (18 and under)
Additional Information
David Milsom—founder and artistic director of the West Riding Ensemble—is one of only a handful of global authorities on violin playing in the long 19th-century; his Romantic Violin Performing Practices: A Handbook (2020, Boydell & Brewer) explores the topic in hands-on terms, inviting fellow violinists to revisit practices that were trademarks of Franck’s world.
David and Alice first performed together at the official launch of WRE in September 2024, when the ensemble revelled in a shared passion for Shostakovich’s chamber music. Now they come together again to delve into another common interest with Franck’s violin sonata.
In keeping with the raison d'être of WRE, the quintet line-up for this concert sees talented young students, Maria Nikolaeva, Perris Heath, and Lucas Jordan, working with seasoned musicians in a professional recital. WRE is a not-for-profit organisation that aims to give a professional platform to emerging young musicians in an 'apprentice' model, and pays students a fair fee for their work.
