French Music

We begin our 2025-26 Main Stage “Music Around the World” series of concerts with a program of late Romantic and early 20th Century French music. 

The opening work, Charles Gounod’s elegant and sparkling Petite symphonie, showcases nine of our wind players in a delightful chamber piece.  A slow, lyrical opening sets up the contrasting playful first movement with melodies passed back and forth across the group.  The beautiful second movement features the flute in a tender arioso. Then we dash off in a hunting song for the scherzo and wrap up with a lively finale.

Our second offering is Arthur Honegger’s Pastorale d’été, where we bring in the string players to join the winds.  Honegger wrote this symphonic poem while hanging out in the Swiss Alps in the summer of 1920, and it seems to capture the feeling of a summer dawn in those mountains, with a beautiful soaring theme on the French horn.

The final work on the program is Gabriel Fauré’s beloved Requiem.  The Bach on the Rock Chamber Choir is excited join the orchestra for this work, along with two very talented soloists whom we’ve had the pleasure of working with before, Gwen Jamieson (soprano) and Louis Dillon (baritone).   Fauré’s own comment on the piece captures the essence of it beautifully:

It has been said that my Requiem does not express the fear of death and someone has called it a lullaby of death. But it is thus that I see death: as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above, rather than as a painful experience.


Tickets are $30 General/$5 Youth, online or at the door (cash, cheque or card), or $25 General/$5 Youth, at the special presale rate from Bach on the Rock members only, until October 18.