Nicky Spence - Fauré- La bonne chanson & Other Songs (2025) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

Fauré’s songs represent his art at its most radiant, demonstrating the composer’s exceptional gift for melody as well as his acute sensitivity to the subtleties of the greatest French poets of the day. In La bonne chanson, the result is a song cycle like few others: an ecstatic hymn to the beloved (the composer’s mistress) which celebrates the triumph of love. Here, it provides a glorious opening to Nicky Spence and Julius Drake’s all-Fauré recital.

Gabriel Fauré wrote his first song, Le papillon et la fleur, as a boy of sixteen in the Niedermeyer School’s canteen, encouraged by his piano teacher, Camille Saint-Saëns. It was the start of an enchantment with art song that lasted all his life. With his exceptional gift for melody and its intimate connection with the subtlety and flow of the French language, plus his skill at condensing musical ideas, the genre seemed made for him.

Fauré’s output of songs embraced some sixty years and much of his reputation rested on them. Interviewed in Le Petit Parisien in 1922, he remarked: ‘Yes, they’ve been sung a lot … Not enough to make my fortune, but too much even so. My colleagues in the profession reckoned that as I’d done so well in the medium, I ought to stick to it all the time!’

Fauré set some of the finest Francophone poets of his day, starting with Victor Hugo and progressing through Théophile Gautier, Leconte de Lisle and Armand Silvestre. Paul Verlaine’s work provided a particularly happy match of artistic minds and had already inspired some of Fauré’s finest songs before he began work on La bonne chanson in 1892. In it, he turns nine of Verlaine’s poems to his fiancée Mathilde Mauté into an ecstatic, virtually pantheistic hymn to the beloved.

TRACKLIST

1. Nicky Spence - La bonne chanson, Op. 61: No. 1, Une Sainte en son auréole
2. Nicky Spence - La bonne chanson, Op. 61: No. 2, Puisque l'aube grandit
3. Nicky Spence - La bonne chanson, Op. 61: No. 3, La lune blanche luit dans les bois
4. Nicky Spence - La bonne chanson, Op. 61: No. 4, J'allais par des chemins perfides
5. Nicky Spence - La bonne chanson, Op. 61: No. 5, J'ai presque peur, en vérité
6. Nicky Spence - La bonne chanson, Op. 61: No. 6, Avant que tu ne t'en ailles
7. Nicky Spence - La bonne chanson, Op. 61: No. 7, Donc, ce sera par un clair jour d'été
8. Nicky Spence - La bonne chanson, Op. 61: No. 8, N'est-ce pas ?
9. Nicky Spence - La bonne chanson, Op. 61: No. 9, L'hiver a cessé
10. Nicky Spence - Lydia, Op. 4 No. 2
11. Nicky Spence - Chanson d'amour, Op. 27 No. 1
12. Nicky Spence - Le secret, Op. 23 No. 3
13. Nicky Spence - 5 Mélodies de Venise, Op. 58: No. 2, En sourdine
14. Nicky Spence - Les roses d'Ispahan, Op. 39 No. 4
15. Nicky Spence - 5 Mélodies de Venise, Op. 58: No. 1, Mandoline
16. Nicky Spence - Notre amour, Op. 23 No. 2
17. Nicky Spence - Les berceaux, Op. 23 No. 1
18. Nicky Spence - Poème d'un jour, Op. 21: No. 1, Rencontre
19. Nicky Spence - Poème d'un jour, Op. 21: No. 2, Toujours
20. Nicky Spence - Poème d'un jour, Op. 21: No. 3, Adieu
21. Nicky Spence - Automne, Op. 18 No. 3
22. Nicky Spence - Clair de lune, Op. 46 No. 2
23. Nicky Spence - Dans la forêt de septembre, Op. 85 No. 1



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