This concert is an exhibition of 20th- and 21st-century French works, from wunderkind Lili Boulanger to jazz-influenced Guillaume Connesson. Henri Dutilleux brings a pinch of avant-garde flair, a tradition carried on by the ever-experimental Pascal Dusapin. This opening concert captures the threads running through the festival, an invitation to explore the diversity of chamber music, from incidental pieces to the avant-garde…

La Querelle des Bouffons is a musical scandal that rattled Paris in the mid-18th century.  The dispute (literally “the quarrel of the comic actors”) pitted the French composer Jean-Philippe Rameau against philosopher-musician Jean-Jacques Rousseau. What began as an argument over the merits of French opera versus the lighter, more playful Italian comic style…

Two young artists, one a painter and one a musician, both in love with the same woman, compelled and tormented by a single violin melody. It’s no wonder that this story, from Ivan Turgenev’s novella Le Chant de l’amour triomphant (‘The Song of Triumphant Love’), provided inspiration for Ernest Chausson’s haunting Poème, with the violin soloist echoing the novella’s recurring theme.…

Could the Adagio of Gabriel Fauré’s first piano quartet have inspired the Vinteuil’s fictional sonata, the “little phrase” of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time? In the novel, the sonata marks the deepening love between Swann and Odette before twisting into a motif for the heartache of their separation.  Fauré himself was grieving after the end of his engagement to Marianne Viardot, and…