“It began with a piece which I fell in love with Eugène Ysaÿe s Poème élégaique”. You have to tune the bottom violin string a tone lower. That explains the dark character, which you hear particularly in the middle, which is a funeral march Ysaÿe dedicated it to Gabriel Fauré. And so the idea for this CD was born: violin music by composers who honoured and inspired one another. I found out, for example, that Fauré often visited the famous singer Pauline Viardot’s salon. It was there that he premiered the Romance. At first it sounds like a rather sweet Fauré, but passions rise high in the middle. Fauré was briefly engaged to a daughter of Viardot. The Russian writer Ivan Toergenjev, Viardot’s lover, used the affair in his short story Le chant de l’amour triomphant, on which, in turn, Ernest Chausson based his Poéme, with its dreamy music and a tragic ring. Chausson dedicated it to Ysaÿe and drew inspiration from his Poème élégaique, as one hears in the high violin trills at the end of both pieces.