Of all this year’s significant musical anniversaries, it’s the centenary of the death of Gabriel Fauré that most obviously offers scope for a Wigmore Hall tribute. Either Fauré’s piano works or his chamber music could have served as the starting points for such an event, and there will be a weekend devoted to the chamber works later in the autumn. But it was the mélodies that featured in this opening gala, 48 of them, almost half of Fauré’s entire song output.
Soprano Véronique Gens, mezzo Fleur Barron, tenor Laurence Kilsby and baritone Stéphane Degout were the soloists for this special occasion, with pianistic responsibilities shared between Susan Manoff and Julius Drake. They presented the songs in more or less chronological order, beginning with Fauré’s first setting, of Victor Hugo’s Le Papillon et la Fleur, which dates from 1861, when he was 16 and beginning to study with Saint-Saëns, and ending with his last song cycle, L’Horizon Chimérique, composed in 1921. Degout had those four songs to himself, wrapping his honeyed tone around every phrase, but elsewhere the sequence was shared out more democratically, so that all four singers contributed to a performance of Fauré’s best known cycle, La Bonne Chanson, on poems by Paul Verlaine.
