0 Fauré: Cello Sonatas

One has a powerful sense of Cecile Licad and Alban Gerhardt's compelling grasp of architecture...[in the Andante of No. 1] Licad's melting lines are wonderfully voiced, and we have a choice of finales - one at Faure's own controversially slow tempo, and one at the performer's preferred, faster tempo. In the Second Sonata, Gerhardt captures the first movement's exalted energy.” --BBC Music Magazine, March 2012 ****

Gramophone Magazine Editor's Choice - April 2012

“They make a particularly fine duo here, working emotionally in unison, sensing the music’s contours with like mind, breathing as one...their feeling for moments of drama and repose is held in ideal equilibrium, and their pointing up of Fauré’s individual harmonic shading is judged instinctively.” --The Telegraph, 13th January 2012 *****

“Alban Gerhardt's account of Fauré's two cello sonatas, both late works, repay careful listening. Like the works themselves, his playing and that of the pianist Cecile Licad is full of subtleties, the half-tones and inflections that make the chamber music of Fauré's final decade so elusive and fragile. Nothing here is forced or made to conform” --The Guardian, 19th January 2012 ****

“From every standpoint, Gerhardt's accounts of the sonatas seem exceptional, with their assured technical mastery and uncanny depth of insight...none of [the] rival accounts will readily eclipse these sonorously authoritative new performances...Magnificent cello playing from Gerhardt, empathetically supportive accompaniments from Licad and a wonderfully natural and atmospheric recording to boot.” --International Record Review, January 2012

“[Gerhardt] has the command of a very fine virtuoso...[Gerhardt and Licad] sound free as air, intellectually confident, full of verve, with niceties of balance and intensities never an issue; a convincing frame of colour, movement and sound in place for every movement...obviously the one to get. May it win friends for some excellent and still undervalued music.” --Gramophone Magazine, April 2012

Detail: Fauré: Cello Sonatas

0 Fauré: Orchestral Works

Faure wrote surprisingly few orchestral works, and it was a good idea on the part of Chandos to assemble this selection. However, although the transcription of the celebrated cello Elegie is the composer’s own, the Dolly suite, originally for piano duet, comes here in Henri Rabaud’s arrangement and the flute Fantaisie is the transcription made by Louis Aubert for Jean-Pierre Rampal. The biggest concertante work here, the Ballade of 1881, is Faure’s orchestration of his piano piece of the same name; it is gentle music that persuades and cajoles in a very Gallic way. Though not an overtly virtuoso utterance, it makes its own exacting technical demands on the soloist, among them being complete control of touch and pedalling.

The deservedly established Faurean Kathryn Stott meets these with consistent success, and, predictably, she receives idiomatic support from Yan Pascal Tortelier and the BBC Philharmonic.

Masques et bergamasques, which takes its title from Verlaine’s sad, mysterious poem Clair de lune, is a late stage work that the composer himself described as melancholy and nostalgic, but it is hardly romantic, being instead pointedly neo-classical in character and shape, recalling Bizet’s youthful C major Symphony and Grieg’s Holberg Suite. Here, too, we find Faure the transcriber, for all but one of the pieces in this orchestral suite of four are revisions of much earlier piano pieces. The playing here under Tortelier is very satisfying, as are the elegant flute solos of the exquisitely delicate Pavane, here performed without the optional chorus, and in Dolly.

The rarely heard Overture to the opera Penelope is also effectively presented here – as is everything in this generous programme. There’s little rhetoric and no bombast in Faure’s art, but how civilized he was, and what sympathetic interpreters serve him here! Chandos’s warm yet delicate recording suits the music well. -- Christopher Headington, Gramophone [5/1996]

Detail: Fauré: Orchestral Works