Liszt & Fauré

Program

Franz Liszt (1811 – 1886) – Les Préludes (1854)

Franz Liszt (1811 – 1886) – Totentanz (1849)

Gabriel Fauré (1845 – 1924) – Requiem Op.48 (version 1893)

The Vox Luminis choir and Anima Eterna, both ensembles in residence at the Concertgebouw Brugge, are joining forces to offer their historically informed interpretation of Fauré’s Requiem. Jos van Immerseel, a pioneer in the rediscovery of twentieth-century French repertoire on historical instruments (Debussy and Ravel already 20 years ago!), wanted to offer the public his (re)discoveries of another major figure in French music, Gabriel Fauré. He chose the 1893 version, the first ‘complete’ version of the Requiem.

This astonishing and atypical piece was best described by Fauré himself: “It has been said that it does not express the dread of death; someone has called it a lullaby of death. But that’s how I feel about death: as a happy release, an aspiration to happiness beyond, rather than as a painful passage”. In the mirror, two powerful and seminal works by Franz Liszt – whom Fauré admired and whom he went to meet expressly in Weimar in 1877 – the symphonic poem Les Préludes and above all the famous Totentanz, a paraphrase on the Dies Irae — the liturgical part discarded by Fauré in his Requiem — under the fingers of the young pianist Joseph Moog who thus continues a collaboration with Anima Eterna begun in 2023.

With the support of the tax shelter measure through Flanders Tax Shelter.

• Franz Liszt
• Gabriel Fauré
• Jos van Immerseel
• Joseph Moog
• Thomas Bauer
• Yeree Suh