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Live at the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Proms: the Quatuor Van Kuijk join baritone James Atkinson and pianist Michael Pandya for a chamber concert that nods to fin de siècle Paris, featuring Debussy’s String Quartet, Fauré’s exquisite song cycle La bonne chanson and Holmès’s Les heures.

Presented by John Toal from the Ulster Hall in Belfast

Augusta Holmès
Les Heures'

Claude Debussy
String Quartet in G minor

INTERVAL (at approx. 1545): Michael Longley's Life of Poetry
In conversation with presenter Olivia O'Leary, Belfast poet Michael Longley, who celebrated his 85th birthday on 27th July 2024, looks back on a life of poetry. He talks about his home town of Belfast, his love of jazz, the group of poets that emerged from Northern Ireland in the 1960s, writing about the Troubles, and a lifetime of poetry. And he reads four poems from his collection Ash Keys: New Selected Poems (Cape Poetry), published to mark his 85th birthday: Elegy for Fats Waller, The Ice-cream Man, Ceasefire and Age. He also reads Bookshops from his collection Angel Hill.

You can hear the whole, five-part series of this conversation in Radio 3’s The Essay: /programmes/m0020pnt

Producer: Claire Cunningham
Executive Producer: Regan Hutchins

Michael Longley's Life of Poetry is a Rockfinch production for ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio 3.

PROM: PART 2
Gabriel Fauré
La bonne chanson

Step into fin de siècle Paris, where the poet Verlaine, the painter Monet and the composers Fauré and Debussy would meet at regular soirées. From Verlaine, Fauré took nine poems to set as his exquisite cycle La bonne chanson – a serene depiction of the love Fauré was currently experiencing for Debussy’s future wife. Debussy’s own String Quartet was finished while Fauré’s work was still in progress, and proved one of the composer’s first ventures into his new, luxuriant musical world of light, sensuality and fragile beauty. The concert opens with a work by Augusta Holmès, one of the many 19th-century French women composers now being rediscovered. Her intimate song cycle Les heures contemplates the ‘hours’ of the day.