As sumptuous and soft as a chaise longue

BELLE EPOQUE

Daniel Hope Deutsche Grammophon

British violinist Daniel Hope is a dab hand at inventing ingenious “concept” albums, which bundle together a cleverly contrived mix of well-loved classics and obscure but nevertheless attractive pieces under an enticing label such as Spheres, Journey to Mozart or Escape to Paradise (The

Hollywood Album). Now comes Belle Epoque, which fits the formula to a T. It consists of two CDs, the first recorded with the chamber orchestra Hope directs, the Zürcher Kammerorchester, the second containing mostly violin and piano duets with the excellent Simon Crawford-Phillips.

The cover, which shows Hope in front of a sumptuously gilded Klimt mural, perfectly catches the tone of the CDs. They are packed with gorgeous pieces, mostly on a miniature scale, evoking the brilliance of European civilisation in the decades leading up to the First

World War.

In his liner notes, Hope nods towards the period’s

“serious social problems, political tensions… and imperialism,” but in fact those things are barely reflected in the music.

True, the second movement of Ernest Chausson’s Concerto for Violin, Piano and String Quartet, the biggest piece on these CDs, is massively gloomy. But it’s more

Gothic gloom than anything contemporary, and the rest of the piece is as soft and sumptuous as a chaise longue in a Parisian boudoir – a bit too soft, to be honest. Hope performs the piece in an arrangement for string orchestra which overthickens Chausson’s already rich score.

But everything else is a joy. The variety of tone is surprisingly large, running all the way from the courtly neoclassicism of Reynaldo Hahn through the innocence of Arnold Schoenberg’s Notturno (written well before he turned “modern”) to the intensity of Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro.

Among the fascinating rarities is a delicious early piece by Ravel which shows the brilliant 20-year-old feeling his way towards his mature style. Only at the very end does modernity burst in on this gilded world, in the shape of Webern’s evanescent Four Pieces. It’s a cleverly theatrical ending to an ingeniously conceived and beautifully executed release.