Piano Quartet No. 1 / Piano Trio

Piano Quartet No. 1 / Piano Trio Naxos 8.573042

Gabriel Fauré’s musical language bridges a gap between the romanticism of the 19th century and the new worlds of music which appeared in the 20th, employing subtle harmonic changes and a gift for melody to combine innovation with an entirely personal idiom. His First Piano Quartet is filled with characteristic French colour and lyricism, and the Piano Trio in D minor is a late work whose musical language is familiar from his songs. Both the Pavane and the popular Sicilienne express nostalgia for earlier times, and the short Pièce has great simplicity and charm.

Review:
It was Gabriel Urbain Faure, a man who had enjoyed a quiet life, but was now faced with making sweeping changes that would take French music into the next century. He was almost fifty when an unexpected appointment to the Paris Conservatoire was soon followed by an internal scandal that led to his popular installation as its Director. His compositions reflected his calm personality, though as the outer movements of his First Piano Quartet shows, he was also a man who could write in a very passionate way. His scherzo bubbles with wit and good humour, though it was his innate refinement that makes his music very special, the melody that runs through the slow movement being one of the most beautiful in French chamber music. For the Piano Quartet the Kungsbucka Piano Trio, together with the viola of Philip Dukes, certainly equal my long-standing top recommendation from Domus, and I hope they now record the second quartet. Lovely playing in the Piano Trio, the remainder of the disc offering some lightweight transcriptions…the Naxos recording team have done an excellent job.
David Denton, David’s Review Cor­ner