Daniel Hope's latest release, the double album 'Belle Époque', illuminates the creative period of Europe before the First World War.
The compilation brings together familiar and rarer repertoire from the 'beautiful era' between the end of the Franco-Prussian War (1871) and the beginning of the First World War in 1914. This fascinating period had long stirred a desire in Hope: 'I often longed to travel back to that era—to the Parisian salons and that cultural flowering.' On his 17th album for Deutsche Grammophon, Hope coaxes beautiful sounds from his 1742 'Ex-Lipinski' Guarneri del Gesù accordion. The collection encompasses various musical forms—from solo pieces to orchestral works and chamber music—and reflects the diverse currents of the time: Late Romanticism, Impressionism, and the early Second Viennese School. Alongside familiar works like Massenet's 'Méditation aus Thaïs', the album also includes avant-garde pieces such as Anton Webern's 'Four Pieces' Op. 7, as well as lesser-known masterpieces by composers like Schoenberg, Rachmaninoff, and Elgar. The recordings convey that melancholic, sometimes bittersweet atmosphere so characteristic of the music of this remarkable era.
The recordings convey that melancholic, sometimes bittersweet atmosphere so characteristic of the music of this remarkable era.