Sonya Yoncheva has long been fascinated by George Sand. Writer, dramaturg and literary critic, a journalist and an intellectual, the lover of Alfred de Musset and then of Frédéric Chopin as well as being a friend of Franz Liszt, Pauline Viardot and Marie Dorval, and beyond her remarkable destiny as a woman blessed with the ‘glorious and complete independence’ which in her age was reserved solely for men, Sand embodies the entire spirit, the essence even, of the 19th century.

It is in the first place her boldness, approaching the intrepid, which appeals to the Bulgarian soprano. Sand showed daring for all of her life, and what a fount of inspiration her writings are, on all kinds of topics. Whether political, social, cultural, artistic, how pertinent they are, and how their vibrant, trenchant language dazzles.

George Sand loved the arts unconditionally. And so this programme opens the doors to us, revealing her artistic universe and bringing her passions to life. Her house, her kitchen, her salon stir into action again, in this soirée in the company of her friends, these artists to whom she was so close and who, respectfully and with tender affection, listened to each other, conversed, laughed, and celebrated in music and poetry. Here, George Sand does not sing, nor does she play an instrument. So Sonya Yoncheva portrays her by reading some of her words. They bear witness to the sparkling, glittering nature of the ‘Lady of Nohant’.

What surprises there are throughout this recital! If the passionate urges of Alfred de Musset, fervent or, as so often, disappointed, nourish this journey equally, so the sumptuous Nuit de décembre by Ruggero Leoncavallo, the more hedonistic examples of Pauline Viardot, these two Mazurkas by Chopin transformed into mélodies with Louis Pomey’s slightly schoolboyish texts, or more obscurely the ‘medley’ of Les Bohémiennes, marrying diverse motifs, of Brahms’s Hungarian Dances, also delight heart and mind – a beautiful homage to the innate music that derives from folk and popular traditions, something that George Sand so frequently and tenderly extolled.