Belle Époque

Concert Party presents a performance featuring songs, chamber music, and piano works of this remarkable era and its aftermath with compositions by Debussy, Ravel, and Satie as well as gems by lesser-known composers such as Guy Ropartz and Ernest Chausson.

The Belle Époque marked thirty years from the late 19th century to the outbreak of the First World War in France. These were the Banquet Years when Paris reigned as the cultural capital of the world: the era of Sarah Bernhardt, late Impressionism, Cubism, the Folies Bergère, and the Avant-garde. The Belle Époque crucially heralded the birth of modern music with Debussy’s “L’apres-midi d’un faune”. With the famous opening flute solo of that work, Debussy threw down a gauntlet to Wagner and his followers who reigned supreme in the classical music world. French music opened itself to a startling array of influences: contemporary poetry, the visual arts, nature, music of other cultures such as gamelan and jazz, and the imagined world of ancient Greek music. 

“Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.” Claude Debussy