Lucas Debargue is a gifted pianist with sumptuous tonal resources, a seemingly inexhaustible technique and a frightening level of concentration. He’s also something of a daredevil. A relatively young musician with a late-starting career, he only began to pay serious attention to Fauré – not the easiest composer to grasp – when he came across the Preludes in 2020. Overwhelmed by the discovery, he decided to jump into the deep end immediately, and by 2022 he’d recorded Fauré’s complete piano output. Not surprisingly, the mismatch between his talent and his experience generates a combination of revelations and disappointments.

The virtues of Debargue’s set stand out clearly. Most arresting is his technical finesse. Chopin and Schumann, as Cortot taught us, can survive under a barrage of wrong notes. Fauré’s music, equally demanding (if not more so), doesn’t leave any room for approximation – nor does it get any from Debargue. The precision of the filigree in the Nocturne No 6 (I’d love to hear him take on Liszt’s First Légende), the stunning repeated notes in the Prelude No 8, the fluency of the étude-like Impromptu No 5: even though Debargue favours precipitous tempos (more on that later), the pianism is immaculate throughout. His exquisite touch and colour, coupled with a fine sense of vertical balance that allows him to differentiate the interweaving lines clearly, only add to the refinement.

Yet for all their crystalline elegance, you’d never call these readings fragile, much less uniform. This is not Fauré ‘with the shutters down’ (an approach the composer famously despised). There’s plenty of backbone throughout, plenty of high-octane drama. Listen to the sense of anticipation at the opening of the Barcarolle No 5, the huge octaves that wash over us in Nocturne No 7 or the solidity of the climax of the Barcarolle No 11 – Debargue’s playing is filled with churning emotion and rugged drama. It’s filled with adventure, too, its eventfulness heightened by a quicksilver responsiveness, whether it be in the twists and turns of the Valse-caprice No 3 or in the mood swings of the Valse-caprice No 4.

But while you’d never call these readings fragile, you’d never call them seasoned either. In his notes, Debargue writes eloquently about the ‘paradoxical world’ of the music – Fauré’s Proustian exploration of the intermediate state between sleep and waking, for example, or his predilection for writing music in which (among other things) ‘the expressive rubs shoulders with the reserved, the spontaneous with the austere’. Debargue’s interpretations, however, don’t always match his descriptions, and we don’t always hear those characteristic ambiguities in his performances. His partiality for quick tempos often leads him to skate over Fauré’s most redolent harmonies, short-circuiting the uniquely Fauréan amalgam of rapture and melancholy in the earlier pieces (the Nocturne No 3 is slightly dry-eyed) and the sorrow that melts into bitterness in the final works, a quality so well drawn out by Marc-André Hamelin (Hyperion). And his overall earnestness leads him to discount Fauré’s rare but striking flashes of irony (say, in the off-kilter Mazurka).

Then, too, while Debargue avoids the sentimentality that mars so many performances of Fauré, he sometimes does so in a way that’s nearly as troubling. At times, he bullies the music. His Valse-caprice No 1, for example, is hard, even rude, snubbing the often-surprising pianos and pianissimos that Jean-Philippe Collard (Warner), febrile though he is, so artfully captures. At other times, Debargue submits to the understandable temptation to show off his digital prowess, highlighting the passagework to such an extent that it distracts us from the music’s heart. It’s undeniably dazzling – but that’s scarcely the point of Fauré’s aesthetic.

I’m not sure, moreover, that his decision to record on a new 102-key piano built by Stephen Paulello was a wise one. It’s a beautiful-sounding instrument, with tremendous resonance; but especially given Debargue’s sometimes enthusiastic pedalling – and the reverberant studio – the sound can be overpowering in its richness, and intimacy can be lost. At least as recorded here, this seems a piano for Rachmaninov, not Fauré.

In the end, then, this set does not supersede Kathryn Stott’s survey (Hyperion) as the first choice for listeners who want a one-stop Fauré collection; much less does it replace Hamelin’s superlative recording of the Nocturnes and Barcarolles for those willing to consider something less comprehensive. But as a work in progress, an introduction to a brilliant new pianist, Debargue’s latest release will amply reward your attention.

Fauré Complete Piano Music

Lucas Debargue pf

Sony Classical 19658 84988-2 (4 CDs)

This review originally appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of International Piano. Never miss an issue – subscribe today