Donald Macleod follows the dramatic thread running through Gabriel Fauré's musical output. Today, whimsy, influenza, a close shave with bankruptcy and a late, great chamber work.

After the success of his opera Pénélope, Fauré was keen to write another - but it was not to be. The Great War intervened and for the time being, costly new productions were out of the question. Pénélope would be Fauré's last venture onto the operatic stage, although he did at least live to see it revived, at the Opéra-Comique in Paris - see it rather than hear it, as by now his deafness was total, forcing him to resign his directorship of the Paris Conservatoire. There was one last commission for the stage - a rather curious one from the fairy-tale principality of Monaco, for a lavish 'divertissement' inspired by the Fétes galantes poetry of Verlaine - Masques et bergamasques. It was a great success, underlining Fauré's hard-won status in French artistic life - further underlined when he was made a 'Grand Officier' of the Legion of Honour, a distinction rarely accorded to musicians. On the debit side of the balance, Fauré became seriously ill in the flu pandemic that swept Europe after the war; and he 'caught a cold' financially speaking when the devaluation of the franc shrunk his pension. Only the help of American friends, including the painter John Singer Sargent, saved him from penury. In gratitude, Fauré sent Sargent the manuscript of his 2nd Piano Quintet, a magnificent flowering of the composer's final years.

Masques et bergamasques - suite Op 112
Seattle Symphony
Ludovic Morlot, conductor

Piano Quintet No 2 in C minor, Op 115
Jean-Philippe Collard, piano
Quatuor Parrenin

'Je me suis embarqué' (L'horizon chimérique, Op 118)
Gérard Souzay, baritone
Dalton Baldwin, piano

Producer: Chris Barstow. Show less