Performers: John Ogdon (piano), Louis Fremaux (conductor), City Of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra
Hear the original solo piano version of this work: • Gabriel Fauré - Ballad...
Programme notes from a Naxos CD:
Fauré was himself a pianist and the piano was his favourite instrument. In his primary vocation as a composer, he wrote music first at his desk, although all his music for the piano is essentially in a pianistic idiom that suited, at least, his own very personal piano technique, something that is not necessarily the case with the music of those who choose to compose at the keyboard.
Fauré's Ballade in F sharp major, Op. 19, is an early work, the source of the later version for piano and orchestra. It was probably in 1882 that he played the work to Liszt, a composer whose piano music strongly influenced him at the time. Liszt, as Fauré reported, sat down at the piano to sight-read the Ballade, but then turned to Fauré and asked him to continue, since he had "run out of fingers". The work was written in 1879 and dedicated to Camille Saint-Saens. It was first performed in its fuller version, with the composer as soloist, at a concert of the societe Nationale de Musique in April 1881, with the conductor Edouard Colonne. The work falls into three sections and continues to exercise a charm and fascination, felt, among others, by Marcel Proust, whose central character, Swann, is carried away by a snatch of such music, a phrase that leads him to unknown horizons.