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It was the age of the Lumière Brothers, Alexander Graham Bell, Karl Benz, the Wright Brothers and Louis Blériot, Marie Curie and Louis Pasteur – an age not unlike our own, marked by rapid scientific and technological development as well as intense literary, artistic and musical activity. The Belle Époque, the period between the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and the outbreak of World War One in 1914, was a time of apparent peace and prosperity but with a darker reality of social and economic deprivation lying not far beneath its gilded surface. This era of creativity and contradiction has long fascinated Daniel Hope: “I often wish I had a time machine to go back to the salons of Paris, indeed to that entire age,” he says. Belle Époque – Hope’s 17th recording for Deutsche Grammophon – offers a panoramic snapshot of the music that came out of this world, capturing its mix of late-Romantic, Impressionist and Modernist styles. The violinist’s double album places popular repertoire by Massenet, Debussy and Elgar alongside rarely heard miniatures by Rachmaninov, Charles Koechlin, Frank Bridge and members of the Second Viennese School. “It was a time when people started to question the very idea of art,” Hope explains. “Where did it come from, what was it allowed to say, what were its values and what should or could it express?” Composers, while still drawing on models from the past, were experimenting with new techniques and sonorities and, as time went on, began to reflect the underlying tensions of a world that was about to be swept away by war.