As day gives way to night, music becomes something different: more intimate, more mysterious, and charged with memory and emotion. Harmonie du Soir by Candlelight is an immersive piano experience conceived around the poetry of twilight and the expressive world of the night.

Presented by British pianist Cyrill Ibrahim, the concert invites audiences into a carefully crafted atmosphere where music, poetry, light and space converge. Inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s poem Harmonie du soir (Evening Harmony), the evening explores the fleeting beauty of dusk, the melancholy of passing time and the strange clarity that darkness can bring. In Baudelaire’s poem, fragrances, sounds and images of the setting sun become intertwined, evoking a world in which beauty and sorrow exist side by side. Memory emerges as a luminous presence, preserving what time would otherwise carry away. These ideas form the artistic heart of the concert: music as a passage from light into darkness, and from darkness into memory.

The concert brings together piano works spanning different musical worlds, from the introspection of Beethoven and Mozart to the poetic soundscapes of Debussy and Chopin, culminating in the visionary, atmospheric writing of Liszt.

The programme will include works by:

Ludwig van Beethoven – including the Piano Sonata No. 14, Moonlight Sonata

Claude Debussy – including Clair de lune

Frédéric Chopin – including the Heroic Polonaise

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – including the Piano Sonata in A minor, K. 310

Franz Liszt – including Harmonies du soir

Théophile Krosi-Douté – a contemporary work, with the title to be confirmed

The final programme and running order will be announced in due course.

Rather than presenting the music simply as a sequence of individual works, Harmonie du Soir by Candlelight creates a continuous artistic journey. Contrasting musical voices reveal different shades of night: its stillness and tenderness, its inner turbulence, its sense of distance and its capacity to bring buried emotions to the surface. At the centre of the experience is Liszt’s Harmonies du soir, whose rich harmonies and expressive intensity resonate with the concert’s exploration of twilight, atmosphere and the imagination. Although Liszt’s composition and Baudelaire’s poem are independent works, they meet here through their shared evocation of the evening as a space of heightened sensory and emotional experience.

About the artist

Cyrill Ibrahim is a British pianist and graduate of the Royal College of Music, celebrated for his expressive artistry and distinctive approach to classical music. Described by The Daily Telegraph as “one of the most exciting pianists of his generation”, he has performed at prestigious venues including the Concertgebouw Amsterdam and Philharmonie Berlin, and for King Charles III and Queen Camilla at Balmoral. An Artist-in-Residence at World Heart Beat, Cyrill has been featured in The Times, Tatler, Pianist, Gentleman’s Journal and Attitude, and appeared on BBC One’s The One Show and Sky Arts’ Mozart: Genius for Hire.

Photography credit: Kirsten Sinclair