Fauré Barcarolles and Dolly – Sally Pinkas

There is a particular kind of pianist who understands that Fauré’s music is not shy, exactly, but private — the sort of person at a dinner party who says the most devastating things quietly, almost as an aside, and expects you to have been listening closely enough to catch it. Sally Pinkas is that kind of pianist. Her new disc of the complete barcarolles, paired with the four-hand Dolly suite, will not convert anyone who wants their Fauré served up soft-focus and perfumed. Good. There’s too much of that already.

Start with a confession: the barcarolles are not, on repeated listening, the salon trifles their genre title implies. Chopin invented the piano barcarolle as a vehicle for splendor — think of that single sprawling masterpiece in F-sharp major, all major-sixth swoon and Venetian moonlight turned up to eleven. Fauré took the same rocking 6/8 (sometimes 9/8, when he feels like unsettling the meter under your feet) and used it as a container for thirteen separate investigations into ambiguity. These are not one piece multiplied. They are forty years of a very private man thinking out loud, from 1881 to 1921, and the harmonic language darkens as he goes — not uniformly, not in a straight line, but the later pieces (Nos. 7, 9, 10, 11) live mostly in minor keys and refuse the easy cadence. The tenth, in particular, sounds like Fauré eavesdropping on late Brahms: those thick, murky middle registers, that reluctance to resolve when you expect resolution.

Pinkas plays this repertoire the way a good reader reads difficult prose: slowly enough to notice the qualifying clauses. She is not chasing the tune. Barcarolle No. 2, nominally in G major and genially barcarolle-ish on its surface, turns unsettling under her hands in a way I don’t think I’ve heard quite so plainly since… well, since I can’t think of a comparison, and I’ve sat through a lot of Fauré recitals over the decades. She lets the inner voices needle at the harmony rather than smoothing them into the texture, and by the coda you’re aware something has gone slightly wrong, agreeably wrong, and you can’t say exactly where.

Her touch is light without being thin, no small trick in Fauré, whose piano writing sits awkwardly under fingers that haven’t lived with it. The voicing in the left hand, especially in the later barcarolles, has that grayish, autumnal color that separates real Fauré playing from merely competent Fauré playing. I confess I found myself, more than once, wishing she’d program some Scriabin someday. There’s a kinship in how both composers use harmonic ambiguity as an emotional strategy rather than a special effect, and I suspect she’d find things in the early Scriabin sonatas that most pianists miss because they’re too busy showing off the virtuosity.

Then, changing key entirely, literally and temperamentally, comes Dolly, and the disc turns into something else altogether: a nursery, sunlit, unguarded. Written for Hélène Bardac, the small daughter of Fauré’s mistress Emma, the six pieces are witty, tender, occasionally a little arch. Pinkas is joined here by Evan Hirsch, her husband, for four hands at one keyboard. “Mi-a-ou,” misheard baby talk for the girl’s brother Raoul and not a cat, whatever generations of listeners have assumed, dances by with real charm and not a trace of arthritic archness. The famous “Berceuse” that opens the set breathes with the unforced simplicity that eludes pianists who try too hard to sound simple. Playing four-hand repertoire with your spouse presumably solves certain rehearsal problems other duos never quite manage. The ensemble here has that unlabored rightness. Nobody rushing to prove anything, nobody deferring nervously either.

The recorded sound, which Hirsch himself produced and edited, deserves a word: warm, close without being claustrophobic, the piano’s upper register never turning glassy the way some engineers let Fauré’s high filigree curdle. Pinkas’s own booklet notes are genuinely worth reading, which is rarer than it should be. She has actual things to say about the biographical circumstances and doesn’t pad them with program-note boilerplate.

Is this the only Fauré barcarolle cycle worth owning? No. Germain Thyssens-Valentin’s old set has a Gallic astringency all its own, and Kathryn Stott’s more recent survey has real poetry in it too. But Pinkas earns her place among them, and for listeners who’ve only known Fauré through the songs or the Requiem, this disc makes a persuasive case that the piano music deserves the same devotion. Not bedtime listening. Music that asks you to sit up a little.