Renaud Capuçon and friends

The sheer joy of making music with one's friends needs no further proof, and this joy was notably at the origin of the famous “Schubertiades”, get-togethers around Schubert where art and sociability blended perfectly. In recent years, music lovers have been treated to delicious encounters from one festival to another that were far from stuffy, and concerts around artists wishing to defend their own personal musico-friendly favourites. This is the idea behind “Renaud and friends, carte blanche for Renaud Capuçon” , where we will encounter his long-term musical partners: his brother Gautier on the cello, his faithful musical companion (the extent of their shared recordings is ample proof); the pianist Nicholas Angelich, with whom he has been friends since their time together at the CNSM de Paris; the viola player Gérard Caussé, who is only too happy to complete the trio, notably for some very inspired Brahms' Quartets , recorded in 2008, or for a recent complete works of Fauré's chamber music for piano and strings (2011); but also Frank Braley, with whom he has performed Beethoven's complete sonatas for violin and piano in concert and in recordings in recent years, Clemens Hagen, Jérôme Ducros, Angelika Kirchschlager, Jörg Widmann, Alina Pogostkina and the very young Léa Hennino. The troupe of musicians will be joined by the actor Marie Guillard, memorable as Lady Chatterley in Pascale Ferran's eponymous film, who will punctuate this evening among friends with a reading of poems.

We will hear the first ever performance of a piece written specially for the evening for Renaud Capuçon and Frank Braley by the clarinettist and composer Jörg Widmann, whose practice of the “great forms” of musical theatre coexists harmoniously with his love for chamber music. The rest of the programme is centred around a city, Vienna, and an era of incredible artistic wealth, the turn of the century between the 19th and the 20th: from the romanticism of Brahms' Clarinet Trio , written at the end of his life, to the Quartet by the very young Mahler, as well as some lieder by Korngold; the expressionism of Schoenberg's Transfigured Night , written in 1899; the brevity of Berg and Webern's atonal pieces; the new dodecaphonism of Berg's Adagio from Kammerkonzert , the student's homage to Schoenberg for his fiftieth birthday.