Hyperion Records

Whilst Pierné is perhaps not today to be counted among the very greatest of French composers, Gabriel Fauré certainly is. He was born in 1845 and lived to the age of seventy-nine, dying in 1924. Probably the most unostentatious, unflamboyant composer of his age, he cared nothing for the excitements of large orchestral or virtuoso pieces and wrote no symphonies, concertos or other similarly colourful music, preferring instead to write for the piano and small chamber groups, as well as for the voice; he wrote many songs of outstanding beauty. Fauré left only two works for harp—the Nocturne of 1904, dedicated to Hasselmans, and, from 1918, Une châtelaine en sa tour … The latter’s title, ‘The lady of the castle in her tower …’, is a line taken from a poem by Verlaine set many years earlier by Fauré in his song cycle La bonne chanson.

from notes by Susan Drake © 1989