16. Crespo Midday Series
This recital features two outstanding musicians, Paris-based Mairéad Hickey and Clara Izambert, a brilliant harpist also based in Paris. The small size of this airy venue enables audiences to see the performers close-up and to appreciate their incredible artistry. Saint-Saëns was seventy two when he wrote his deeply romantic Fantaisie for violin and harp giving both players an unrivalled opportunity to show off the most extravagant side of their virtuosity. It comes in seven sections in a single delicious movement, a superbly crafted work that would have marked how out of step the aging composer was with his more progressive contemporaries in the first decade of the last century. Debussy and Ravel both spoke another language, but Fauré always saw him as the great Master. Spohr’s Sonata for harp and violin comes from another world, a full hundred years earlier, presenting a different, more delicate kind of virtuosity, composed for himself and his wife to play, she being as brilliant a harpist as he was a violinist. Pure pleasure.
