Two great interpreters, poets and lovers of the French repertory and chamber music join forces here: the violinist Tedi Papavrami and the pianist Nelson Goerner. They have chosen to devote this programme to the two violin sonatas of Gabriel Faure and the Sonata of Cesar Franck. Cesar Franck and Gabriel Faure were two of the main architects of the renaissance in French chamber music during the final decades of the nineteenth century. Both were members of the Societe Nationale de Musique they helped to found in 1871, along with Camille Saint-Saens, Romain Bussine, Henri Duparc, Jules Massenet and others. It was for this society that Faure wrote his first masterpiece, the Sonata for Violin and Piano in A major. Impelled by patriotism, they jointly undertook a crusade to safeguard French music, adopting the motto Ars Gallica. At the same time, in a century largely dominated by opera, they aspired to rehabilitate the neglected genres of symphonic and chamber music, and song- the typical genres of German music. They succeeded spectacularly, and the number of major works produced in France during this period is phenominal.

• Faure: Violin Sonata No. 1 in A major, Op. 13
• Faure: Violin Sonata No. 2 in E minor, Op. 108
• Franck, C: Violin Sonata in A major