Gabriel Fauré is one of those composers whose reputation exceeds familiarity with much of his oeuvre. As 2024 is the 100th anniversary of Fauré’s death, his music is receiving special attention—and easily living up to the spotlight.

Is it overstatement to call Fauré a modest revolutionary? Where the German composers who dominated much of the 19th century, from Beethoven to Wagner, stormed the heavens in setting forth their Promethean passions, Gabriel Fauré helped forge a different, French pathway, with music that combines harmonic colorfulness, adroit textures, humane restraint, inquisitiveness, and sensuality.

Fauré can seem a pivotal composer, whose balance of classical forms and new openness paves a path to the more radical Debussy and to Fauré’s student Ravel. This program matches Fauré’s valedictory, timelessly serene Piano Quintet No. 2 to Ravel’s arrangement of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, which asks two pianists to investigate the musical conceptions behind the original’s ravishing surfaces, and also to the Venezuelan-born Reynaldo Hahn’s own Piano Quintet, an ingratiating work written in homage to Fauré that shines its light not only on a great master, but on a half-century of a school of uniquely French creativity.

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Ravinia Park Rd & Green Bay Rd

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For more information, call 847.266.5100 [email protected]

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