This album concludes a trio of releases from the Sinfonieorchester Basel under Ivor Bolton, exploring lesser-known stretches of Gabriel Fauré's output. The present works mostly fit the "secret" descriptor. There's a recently discovered world premiere that's lovely: the Prélude to a set of incidental music for a play called La Passion. The music was long lost, but the play starred Sarah Bernhardt, and the six-minute Prélude is not in any sense of throwaway. The rest of the music is choral, and most of it is similarly obscure ...
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This album concludes a trio of releases from the Sinfonieorchester Basel under Ivor Bolton, exploring lesser-known stretches of Gabriel Fauré's output. The present works mostly fit the "secret" descriptor. There's a recently discovered world premiere that's lovely: the Prélude to a set of incidental music for a play called La Passion. The music was long lost, but the play starred Sarah Bernhardt, and the six-minute Prélude is not in any sense of throwaway. The rest of the music is choral, and most of it is similarly obscure. The Messe des pêcheurs de Villerville (Mass of the Fishers of Villerville) of 1881 was a collaboration between Fauré and his student André Messager, written for a benefit concert for a fishermen's charitable organization. One can tell which movements came from Fauré's pen (the Gloria, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei), but it's a situation similar to Mozart's Requiem, K. 626, where the dying Mozart had a degree of input into his student Süssmayr's contributions that nobody has even now quite...
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