★★★★★
Buy it from Buy the CDGabriel Faure, Francis Poulenc, Cesar FranckFrench Violin Sonatas [Giovanni Guzzo, Anne Lovett] [Champs Hill: CHRCD081]NoneChamps Hill2014 "The prima donna violin above an arpeggio piano accompaniment makes me vomit," wrote Poulenc to a friend with characteristic candour, so in 1943 he composed a violin sonata that followed Brahms's example in giving each instrument an equally challenging and yet balancing part...
- www.theguardian.com
2014-08-10
★★★★★
Taken from a concert at last year's City of London festival, this disc interweaves Bach's D minor solo violin Partita with a selection of funereal chorales, followed by a performance - after a speedy segue into the opening organ chord - of Faure's Requiem. The Bach pairing is inspired by a current scholarly theory that this partita was a hidden memorial to his late wife. Choir and soloist, LSO Leader Gordan Nikolitch, come together in the great Chaconne, to wrenching and compelling effect...
- www.guardian.co.uk
2012-11-24
★★★★★
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...
- www.guardian.co.uk
2012-01-26
★★★★★
Though their opus numbers, 89 and 115, suggest that both Fauré's piano quintets were late works, the first was actually drafted in the 1880s, and only revised in the early years of the 20th century. For that reason it's a less weighty and harmonically complex work than the second, full of airy, floating melodic lines and a jewel-like slow movement...
- www.guardian.co.uk
2010-04-02
★★★★★
Fauré's two piano quintets, completed 15 years apart, rank among his greatest chamber works. First performed in 1906, the First is typical of the mature Fauré, with its effortless thematic integration and intricate development. The second belongs to the final period of the composer's career, when his music became more rarefied and harmonically elliptical, as if the world of the first quintet was being revisited from a new, uncharted direction...
- www.guardian.co.uk
2010-04-02
★★★★★
This is a wonderfully played pairing of perhaps the two greatest of all French string quartets. Both are late scores - Franck's huge work was completed in 1889, the year before the composer's death, while Faure's compact three-movement work was the last in the extraordinary series of chamber works that led up to his death in 1924...
- www.guardian.co.uk
2010-04-02
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