Pavane Op. 50 (Arranged for Piano)

Edited and arranged by Wendy Hiscocks and Roy Howat. Faure made a piano transcription of the Pavane, but subsequently he revised his original orchestral score. Hiscocks and Howat's new transcription is true to the spirit of Faure's arrangement. The preface quotes from Sir Adrian Boult's recollection that Faure preferred (and played the piece at) a tempo considerably faster than the rather doleful interpretations one often hears. Faure composed the Pavane in the summer of 1887, originally as a purely orchestral piece for the concert series of the Parisian conductor Jules Danube. For some reason Danube left it unperformed, a miscalculation he must have later regretted when the piece became immensely popular in various forms for orchestra or piano, with or without voices. In 1975, in letters to Robert Orledge, Sir Adrian Boult recalled meeting Faure and hearing him play at the London home of Leo Frank Schuster in 1906 and 1908. Sir Adrian concludes: "May I ask you to do all you can to prevent the prevalent performances of the Pavane as if it were a piece of German Romanticism, written by someone like Schumann with a full measure of sentiment. The words are obviously a leg-pull, and the scene is a number of young people dancing and chaffing each other. . ."