To mark the 25th anniversary of their formation, the German Fauré Quartet turn to Fauré’s own music for their new album, which juxtaposes the composer’s two piano quartets with a group of his songs arranged by Dietrich Zöllner. They’re an idiosyncratic ensemble, in some respects, crossing genres in order to expand the piano quartet repertory, and pushing at the boundaries between classical and popular music in a wide-ranging discography that includes piano quartets by Brahms and Mozart (the latter aroused mixed feelings in these pages in May 2006), a decorous album of pop song transcriptions (2009), and arrangements of Mussorgsky’s Pictures and Rachmaninov’s Études-tableaux (2018).

Their approach to the Fauré quartets is in some ways radical, and placed beside Domus’s much-admired Hyperion recordings may come as something of a surprise. These are high Romantic performances, grand in scale and gesture, in which the warm-sounding strings seem driven and guided by the at times emphatic weight of Dirk Mommertz’s pianism. The turbulent Second Quartet opens with imposing sweep and a sense of great drama, which persist into the edgy Scherzo and a sombre account of the slow movement, before the restless finale gradually chases the shadows away. The outer movements of the First are similarly tense and weighty, arguably too much so. Mommertz releases the pressure, though, in the Scherzo, which is nicely mercurial, while the reflective Adagio, very much the emotional kernel of the performance, is unquestionably beautiful and deeply felt.

The song transcriptions, meanwhile, scale down the emotional pitch and have considerable charm. In ‘Les berceaux’, the closely woven strings pick out melody and harmonies over the piano’s rocking figurations, while ‘Mandoline’ impishly gives the vocal line to Mommertz over a pizzicato accompaniment that sounds at times more like Ravel than Fauré. Here, as elsewhere, the sense of ensemble is strong. The recording itself, however, is so close that you feel you’re sitting among the players, whom you can hear breathing fairly regularly. Whether you care for the album as a whole is probably a matter of taste. When it comes to Fauré’s quartets, Domus are more reined in but also considerably more subtle.