Fauré Piano Quintets – Southon

Of the two piano quintets on this disc — both steeped in that particular Fauréan atmosphere of tender retrospection — it’s the Second that lodges deepest. Written near the end of a long life, it bowled over its first audience completely, and Nicolas Southon, who contributes the album’s exemplary notes, makes a serious claim: that it may be the finest chamber work Fauré ever wrote. Hard to argue.

The Second Quintet opens with the piano tracing those characteristic rippling arpeggios — Fauré’s fingerprint, really, the sound of time itself becoming liquid — and then the viola, of all instruments, steps forward with the principal theme. Luminous. The other strings take it up, pass it around, and the music gathers itself toward a genuine climax before the second theme arrives, ushered in by the strings and then subjected to a brief fugal working-out that the piano dissolves, softly, into something close to reverie. Éric Le Sage plays all of this with a poet’s touch — no pedal-heavy romanticism, no inflated gestures, just a kind of luminous reticence that suits Fauré down to the ground. The string quartet is no less attuned. These players understand that Fauré’s delicacy is not fragility; it takes nerve to hold back.

The second movement — a brisk Allegro vivo — is a small gem. The piano darts and scampers, almost impudent, until the strings intervene with a waltz of such gentle tenderness that you want to reach out and hold it still.

Then the slow movement. Koechlin described the Andante moderato as evoking arms stretched toward a past that cannot be recovered — and I won’t pretend that image left me unmoved. It didn’t. There is something in the imploring quality of this music, its quiet heartbreak, that bypasses critical distance entirely. I sat with wet eyes. So be it.

The finale moves with a harder-edged assurance — less inward, more propulsive — and gives the players room to assert themselves in ways the earlier movements, with all their gentle restraint, do not quite permit.

The First Quintet, from roughly a quarter-century earlier, works differently. Three movements rather than four, and a somewhat cooler emotional temperature — though the opening’s shimmering arpeggios and the strings’ sweet-melancholy theme recall the world of La bonne chanson, Southon is right to note that the sensuality is stripped away, replaced by something leaner, almost austere. The Adagio is full of yearning, but the yearning keeps getting interrupted by passages of cool, almost clinical clarity — an odd effect, not unbeautiful. And the closing Allegretto moderato has a freshness about it, a youthful lightness, like a serenade heard from across a garden at dusk.

Southon’s notes deserve a word on their own. He draws a sustained parallel between Fauré’s creative world and Proust’s — both men working at roughly the same moment, both obsessed with the textures of vanished time. Proust, who knew his Fauré, wrote to the composer in the late 1890s: “Sir, not only do I like, admire and adore your music, but I was and still am in love with it.” You read that and you think: yes. Exactly.

This is as good a Fauré disc as I’ve encountered in years. A strong candidate for any serious list of the year’s best recordings.