Pre-eminent French baritone Stéphane Degout returns to the Festival with Cédric Tiberghien, one of today’s most sought-after pianists. At the heart of their programme is Schumann’s magnificent Liederkreis, op.39: a collection of songs set to the poetry of Joseph von Eichendorff, which encapsulate the Romantic obsessions with nature, longing and mortality. They also feature songs by Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, marking Ravel’s 150th anniversary with his witty but touching cycle Don Quichotte à Dulcinée. The programme is completed with works by the enigmatic but brilliant composer Rita Strohl, who wrote some fifty songs in the space of just three years at the very end of the 19th-century, and Guy Ropartz, an important French song composer of the early 20th-century.