When Fauré played The Spectator

Gabriel Fauré composed his song cycle La bonne chanson in 1894 for piano and voice. But he added string parts later and he premièred that version in April 1898 at the London home of his friend Frank Schuster: 22 Old Queen Street, the building currently occupied by this very magazine. I’m not sure how much Fauré gets played at Spectator HQ these days; his music certainly hasn’t been a feature of recent summer parties. Perhaps Fauré himself caressed the ivories where James Delingpole and Toby Young now prop up the bar. Imagine Verlaine’s poetry drifting out into the garden to mingle with Rod Liddle’s cigarette smoke on the moonlit air. L’heure exquise, indeed.

The studio theatre at the Crucible doesn’t exactly evoke the belle époque either, but on this occasion that hardly mattered. It’s a utilitarian black box, but the atmosphere it generates – with audience closely packed on all four sides of the performance space – is wonderfully immediate, especially when (as on this occasion) it’s filled to capacity. A fellow critic sitting nearby grumbled that it’s an unflattering acoustic for a singer – not much space for them to sing into and very little resonance to help the voice. It’s a valid point, but I don’t buy it. With chamber music, you need to feel the performers’ breath, and Fauré, the darling of the Paris salons, expected his songs to be heard in a drawing-room acoustic: tactile, intimate, and close enough to seduce.

The instrumentalists were Ensemble 360 – the resident ensemble of the Sheffield Chamber Music Festival – and the singer was Roderick Williams. It’s easy to talk about certain musicians as born communicators, but Williams had thought carefully about the way he presented the cycle – reading an English précis of Verlaine’s poem before each song and inviting the audience either to follow the printed translation, or sit back and let the mood and the music take them.