Est 1923

Fauré Piano Quartets

Record and Artist Details

Composer or Director: Gabriel Fauré

Label: Discover International

Media Format: CD or Download

Media Runtime: 64

Mastering:

DDD

Catalogue Number: DICD920231

Tracks:

Composition Artist Credit
Quartet for Piano and Strings No. 1 Gabriel Fauré, Composer
Gabriel Fauré, Composer
Scheuerer Pf Qt
Quartet for Piano and Strings No. 2 Gabriel Fauré, Composer
Gabriel Fauré, Composer
Scheuerer Pf Qt
This young German ensemble and family unit seem to have decided that to play Faure with warmth, care and affection would mean an unwarrantable concession to sentimentality. Correspondingly they adopt an abrasive vigour that rides roughshod over even the composer’s outer manifestations. The start of the Second Quartet’s Adagio non troppo is neither adagio nor pianissimo, let alone dolce espressivo, senza rigor (Faure’s carefully prescribed instructions). And so music once described by Aaron Copland as “intensity on a background of calm” comes to mean far too little. A similar indifference pervades virtually everything else. Listen to the pianist’s lack of dolce at 2'39'' in the First Quartet, or the whole ensemble’s generalized alternative to the pianissimo and leggierissimo mercurial flight of the Scherzo or their absence of exultancy in the finale’s radiant homecoming, and you will become increasingly aware of players who have attempted something beyond their means.
Turn to Domus’s Gramophone Award-winning performances on Hyperion and you enter another world of accomplishment, one where you are aware of forces constantly threatening to erupt through Faure’s outwardly conservative nature. Here the Adagio from the Second Quartet truly suggests extra-terrestrial preoccupations, the horizon chimerique of Faure’s final song-cycle. Discover’s opaque and coarse-grained sound hardly helps, and neither does a perfunctory note suggesting similarity rather than difference between the Scherzos of the two quartets.
'

Fauré Piano Quartets

Quartet for Piano and Strings No. 1

Quartet for Piano and Strings No. 2

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