Eric Le Sage

Julian Prégardien decided to record the Dichterliebe cycle after he came across the new Bärenreiter edition; he went on to explore the work in concerts with his constant accompanist, Eric Le Sage, inserting other works by Robert and also by Clara Schumann, whose bicentenary is celebrated in 2019. When Clara played the Dichterliebe in the 1860s, she used to slip extracts from Kreisleriana between the songs. Prégardien asked Eric Le Sage to record the same extracts on a Blüthner piano of 1856, the year of Robert’s death, and also to include Romances composed by both Robert and Clara at a time when their future marriage was still uncertain.

The sonatas for violin and piano, which were composed on holidays to lakeside forests in the midst of sublime nature where Brahms loved to spend his summers, contain all the contradictions unique to the man who described himself as a wanderer: daring and discipline, naïveté and sagacity, melancholy and joy. Pierre Fouchenneret and Eric Le Sage embark fervently on this adventure with this new volume in this crazy journey through Brahms’s complete chamber music works, charted by B Records. Of the project, Pierre Fouchenneret writes: “One crazy day, a few of us decided to embark on a project which, at the time, some people deemed impossible to achieve: to perform all of Brahms’s chamber music within only a few months. Every concert would be recorded… we are now a company, as in the theatre, bonded by an unstoppable urge, a definite notion of boldness, a shared perception of chamber music and a love for the repertoire.”