Work: Barcarolle, Op.7 no.3

Fauré was the finest of French songwriters. Stéphane Degout and Véronique Gens shine in a full-length evening in a packed Wigmore Hall. 

Centered around the later, lesser-known composers of art song, tonight’s programme started with a first half of melancholy Hugo Wolf Lieder. Both Schubert and Schumann wrote settings of Goethe’s unhappy Harfenspieler, but evidently Wolf was unsatisfied, as, on principle, he avoided setting texts which he thought had been successfully treated before.