Fauré's Requiem

‘I not only admire, adore and venerate your music, I have been and still am in love with it.’

So Marcel Proust wrote to Gabriel Fauré; and beneath the subtle half-tints and serene melodies of Fauré’s Requiem lie emotions every bit as passionate as those that Proust detected. It’s paired tonight with two 20th-century masterpieces by a composer whose flippant image masked a profound religious faith.

James O’Donnell raises the roof in Poulenc’s flamboyant Organ Concerto, and Bertrand de Billy conducts the Seven Tenebrae Responses: a late choral masterpiece by a composer who aspired to ‘an austerity that smells of orange-blossom or jasmine’.