REYNALDO HAHN

“Musical moments” can be moments of memories or reflection, a retrospect of the past or an anticipation of the future, that are enriched by hearing or thinking of a special piece of music in that same moment.

In this fifth Musical Moment, which we will continue every two weeks in a carefully curated series of works recorded by a different DG artist, we release Albrecht Mayer’s performance of the glorious song ‘À Chloris’ by Reynaldo Hahn (1874–1947) after a text by the seventeenth-century French poet Théophile de Viau. Albrecht Mayer is joined by pianist Kimiko Iman in a version for oboe and piano.

À Chloris ranks as one of Reynaldo’s most successful songs, which he composed for the Parisian salons in 1916. Though a pupil of Saint-Saëns, Massenet and Gounod at the Paris Conservatoire, the affluent, Venezuelan-born Reynaldo, who emigrated young to Paris, did not follow in the contemporary French impressionist tradition but focused on the art of composing pastiches, where he placed his own compositional style on top of that of a another composer with another style often from another era. In this case he very obviously composes a charming and elegant song that also has gravity and in this combination the ability to move audiences on top of a bass line of Bach’s Air on the G-string.

Further artists in the series include Daniel Barenboim, Yuja Wang, Nadine Sierra, Avi Avital and Hilary Hahn (coming soon) just to name a few.