Gabriel Fauré

“I discovered Gabriel Fauré when I was very young,” Renaud Capuçon tells Apple Music Classical. “There was a festival near my place in Savoie, in Southeastern France, the Festival des Arcs, high up in the mountains where we went to ski. My parents took us there when we were very young, and that’s where I first heard Fauré—the Berceuse, the sonatas and so on. I loved his music straightaway. And I remember borrowing LPs of his chamber works when I was a kid and copying them onto tapes, which I still have!” In 2024, the French violinist decided to mark the centenary of Fauré’s death with an album that draws on more than 40 years of the composer’s creative life, capturing the lyrical invention and seductive sensuality of Fauré’s musical language. You’ll find enchanting melodies, harmonic riches, irresistible orchestral pieces and a genuine rarity in the form of the sole surviving movement of the composer’s youthful Violin Concerto, Op. 14. Capuçon began playing the first of Fauré’s two violin sonatas when he was 12. Several decades later, he recorded the composer’s complete chamber music for strings and piano in company with his cellist brother, Gautier, and a group of close friends. “I’ve known about the Violin Concerto for at least 25 years,” says Capuçon, “and was delighted to record it for this album. It’s a wonderful piece, quite beautiful. I’m proud to have done it.” As artistic director of the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne, Capuçon’s thoughts turned to recording Fauré’s orchestral works. “My orchestra has this very pure yet warm sound,” he observes. “They have a very natural way of playing Fauré. It’s in their tradition. I knew as soon as we first played Pelléas that we should record it.” The album also includes the Pavane, a song without words for chamber orchestra, the Berceuse, and two suites of miniatures—one based on the composer’s enchanting incidental music to Maurice Maeterlinck’s Symbolist play Pelléas et Mélisande, the other assembled from music conceived in 1919 as an entertainment for the Prince of Monaco and published soon after as Masques et bergamasques. “When you listen to this recording, I think somehow you can imagine a painting by Boudin or Manet,” suggests Capuçon. “It’s directly connected to Impressionism. And I love that as a French guy.” Fauré taught composition in a village near Lausanne during the civil unrest of the Paris Commune, and began work on his opera Pénélope in the Swiss city in 1907. He was also drawn to nearby Evian, where Capuçon serves as artistic director of the annual Rencontres Musicales d’Évian. “I love to connect personal stories like this to the pieces I play and where I perform them,” he notes. “Fauré is connected with so many happy memories for me.”