Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Gabriel Faure's Pavane

Today's post is about Gabriel Faure. He was a French composer of the late 19th century, and a lot of his music that is continued to be performed is relatively slow paced, for smaller orchestras that occasionally didn't include some important instruments - his Requiem has no violins other than a soloist in one movement. He was active before impressionism really got going, but I think in his music you can definitely tell that by his lighter orchestrations he was a transitional figure towards it. The work in particular that I am linking to is his Pavane. It is for orchestra and an optional chorus - I actually have never found a copy of the choral version before, and am very interested in tracking one down. If you know where to get your hands on this, please let me know. Anyway, the most commonly recorded version is just for orchestra. A pavane was a dance from the Renaissance that you would occasionally see used as a slow movement in 4/4 time. I don't have a particular recording recommendation since it is on tons of Faure "best of" types of CDs. Enjoy, this is a pretty good song to relax to.

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