Beau Soir (Faur, Franck, Debussy, Elgar, works for violin & piano)

The centrepiece of this French-themed recital by Kyung Wha Chung and Kevin Kenner is the splendid violin sonata by César Franck. It is a work long associated with Chung, described by the Financial Times as “one of the greatest violinists of the last half-century”. Newer to Chung’s repertoire is Fauré’s Sonata No 1. As she told Strings magazine, each of the works constitutes “a whole portrait of life itself,” and she drew a comparison with Monet’s paintings: “The reflection of light has endless possibility. The same thing applies to the texture and the sound when you’re playing. There are millions of sounds.”