Renaud Capuçon performs music by the 19th-century French composer Ernest Chausson, “the Romantic visionary who bridged Franck and Debussy” in the words of BBC Music Magazine. The reflective and languorous Poème for violin and orchestra – perhaps Chausson’s most famous work – is paired with the captivating four-movement Concert (concerto) for violin, piano and string quartet. Capuçon spins the lines of the Poème in the company of the Brussels Philharmonic and conductor Stéphane Denève; his partners for the Concert, recorded live in Paris in 2020, are Quatuor Ebène and the pianist Nicholas Angelich, who died in 2022 at the age of 51.

This was the last time that Capuçon and Angelich played the Concert together, though they had performed the work frequently since their first meeting in the 1990s. After a concert at the Deauville Festival in 2016, ResMusica wrote: “The poetry and perfection of Angelich’s playing is wondrous in music that presents both technical and interpretative challenges, while Capuçon’s elegance and lyricism are well suited to the congenial violin part that Chausson wrote for Eugène Ysaÿe, the dedicatee of the work.” Ysaÿe led the first performance of the Concert in 1892, four years before he gave the premiere of the Poème, which had been inspired by a passionate short story by the Russian writer Turgenev.