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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

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Composer of the Week

Music: Classical

Kate Molleson

An informative guide to composers' lives and their music.

An informative and accessible guide to composers' lives and their music.

Composer of the Week: Gabriel Faure (1845-1924)

Composer of the Week: Gabriel Faure (1845-1924): Episode 5: The Horizon of Dreams

Gabriel Faure (1845-1924)

Episode 5

Episode 5: The Horizon of Dreams

The Horizon of Dreams

BBC Radio 3 - Composer of the Week, Gabriel Faure (1845-1924), The Horizon of Dreams

Including whimsy, influenza, a close shave with bankruptcy and a late, great chamber work.

Donald Macleod focuses on whimsy, influenza, a close shave with bankruptcy and a late, great chamber work.

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.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Donald Macleod follows the dramatic thread running through Gabriel Faure's musical output.

Donald Macleod follows the dramatic thread running through Gabriel Faure's musical output

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Composer of the Week

Gabriel Faure (1845-1924)

Episode 5: The Horizon of Dreams

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