Epoque Making

The coincidences keep coming on this circuitous route around my various shelves with a second successive disk featuring Yo-Yo Ma. This one is totally different, a chamber recital with Kathryn Stott on piano and Yo-Yo Ma of course on cello. The title is Paris La Belle Epoque, highlighting music from the years around 1900 and the salon culture of the time. Most of the music written for such gatherings featured violin and Yo-Yo Ma has transcribed the pieces here for cello. There are two famously melodic short pieces, Massenet's Meditation from Thais and Saint-Saens Havanaise, plus more weighty sonatas by Faure and Franck. These two sonatas both had impact beyond the purely musical world, a feature of la belle epoque being the interaction between music, art and literature. Proust was particularly enamoured with them. On first listening, it is the cello part that dominates and holds the attnetion but the music is a genuine partnership and Kathryn Stott's piano soon shows how important the interweaving of the themes is. Shared music making of the highest level.