Summer Music in City Churches: Archangel - a foray into Gabriel Fauré

Director of the Paris Conservatoire where his nickname is 'The Archangel', Gabriel Fauré was ultimately responsible for the pre-eminence of French music in the 20th century. It will be 100 years since his death in November 2024.

In this concert, Fenella Humphreys (violin), Viv McLean (piano) and Fauré biographer Jessica Duchen mark the centenary of the composer’s death with a breathtaking musical love story. Drawing on Fauré’s letters to his fiancée, Marianne Viardot, and on Turgenev’s novella The Song of Triumphant Love, it has rarely been told before. Words and music in alternation build the narrative together, while the concert spotlights Fenella in some of the most thrilling French virtuoso violin works of the fin-de-siècle era.

Forms part of the Summer Music in City Churches Festival - ten days of concerts of beautiful music, programmed around themes of love, romance and Shakespeare, hosted in the historic church of St Giles-without-Cripplegate within London's Square Mile.