Number 2 in our series of posts to introduce our spring programme.
Whilst his music needs little introduction, the face of Gabriel Fauré, our first composer, may be less familiar.
Early Life
Born in the Ariège department in 1845, the youngest of six children of a schoolmaster, the young Gabriel demonstrated his musical talent at an early age and was a pupil at the specialist music school, L’école Niedermeyer de Paris, from the age nine for eleven years. There his teachers included Camille Saint-Saëns who encouraged gifted students to compose. Later in his long career Fauré would give us many celebrated works – Pavane, Clair de Lune, the Dolly Suite, his Requiem….. But it was while still a student aged just 19 in 1865 that he won the college composition competition with Cantique de Jean Racine and that is the piece which will form part of our programme on 11th May in Stonehouse.
Cantique de Jean Racine
Jean Racine, one of France’s three great seventeenth century dramatists gives his name to this piece but this is no paean to the playwright. Rather the title recognises the use of Racine’s translation – or rather paraphrase – of an early Latin liturgical text attributed to Ambrose, a fourth century bishop of Milan. It is said that Fauré preferred the “elegant and rather florid” text of Racine to the Latin original.
Written in D-flat major and scored for four vocal parts in an arrangement for organ and strings, Cantique de Jean Racine was first performed in 1866 at Montvilliers Abbey in Normandy with the composer at the organ.
Under the direction of Christopher Barr and with the accompaniment of Razvan Luculescu, Strathaven Choral Society looks forward to performing this masterpiece of the young Fauré on the 11th May at St Ninian’s in Stonehouse.