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.

Gabriel Faure has frequently been termed “the father of Impressionism.” Why this is so rendered very apparent on this state-of-the-art album featuring interpretations of his two Piano Quartets by the superb Mozart Piano Quartet. With great virtuosity, a fine sense of sound, and an intelligent command of the complex overall structure, the four instrumentalists brighten the performance skies with their musical fireworks. The Parisian music world of Faure’s time was characterized by emancipation from Germany hegemony in chamber music after the traumatic outcome of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and by the beginnings of an original French musical language beyond the opera. Faure’s quartets draw formally on the tradition- and yet breathe a new spirit: church modes and whole-tone scales mark so many a motif, and here and there, along with the “classical” development of the themes, we also encounter entirely new harmonic fields and soundscapes. For instance, the beginning of the Adagio in op. 45 already suggests Ravel’s “La vallee des cloches” from the Miroirs: like a memory, distant bells ring in the piano part, over which the very lonely viola gives its all in a pastoral song of lament- enchanting! The two slow movements belong to the absolute highlights on this release.

A Musical Zoo with Ashley Riches and Joseph Middleton is a veritable tour de force, featuring compositions spanning nearly 160 years, from Schubert’s ‘The Trout’ to Shostakovich’s ‘Once there lived a cockroach’ and four languages (German, French, Russian and English). A strong representation of the German Lieder tradition (Schubert, Schumann, Wolf, Brahms and Richard Strauss) is balanced by the French mélodie (Fauré, Ravel) and English lyricism (Ireland, Howells). We humans seem to have an endless fascination with the animal kingdom, and animals have proved an inspiration for artists, composers, and writers alike. This recital demonstrates what a rich seam this has proved for a diverse range of composers. Ashley Riches comments: ‘The text [of a song] may outline to us what we see. But the flutterings of Schubert’s Birds, the flicking antennae of Shostakovich’s Cockroach, the rush of notes with which Ravel’s Peacock spreads its tail – these are movements and energies accessible to music alone.’

Established in Rome in 2016, the Quartetto Werther has already carried off several prizes at chamber-music competitions in its native Italy, and its members have been winners of several competitions for young musicians such as the Premio Geminiani awarded in 2019 to violinist Martina Santarone. As an ensemble they have studied with the Trio di Parma and the Cuarteto Casals, among others. With this release, their debut commercial recording, the Quartetto Werther has produced finely calibrated, beautifully engineered versions of the two piano quartets which make an ideal introduction to the voice of Gabriel Fauré in the realm of chamber music. The romantic, passionate melodies of the Op.15 celebrated Quartet in C minor are enclosed within relatively strict classical forms, with a songlike Adagio at its expressive heart. The Op.45 Quartet in G minor – something of a signature work for the Quartetto Werther – demonstrates a much bolder departure from the Classical tradition in terms of both structure and harmony. Some of its most striking moments include a mercurial Scherzo and a languorous Adagio. Despite the association of both keys with tragic and heroic forces – in the Fifth symphonies of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, for example – Fauré always balances intensity of feeling with a concern for elegance and formal lucidity. As he remarked to his fellow composer Florent Schmitt: ‘To express that which is within you with sincerity, in the clearest and most perfect manner, would seem to me the ultimate goal of art.’ When placed side by side in the Quartetto Werther’s deeply sympathetic interpretations, it is difficult to understand why the superbly crafted and melodically generous Second Quartet has never managed to achieve the popularity of the First, but their recording should win it many new friends.

If a chamber music ensemble can stand together in the same lineup for 25 years, it must be doing something right. The Faure Quartett can be assumed to be doing so: As one of the world's leading piano quartets, the four musicians are at the zenith of chamber music, touring the world's most important venues and breaking down musical boundaries with their recordings. Their Pop Songs album was followed by Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and Rachmaninov’s etudes-Tableaux in 2018, which have never been heard so rousingly before. On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of its foundation, the quartet turns its attention to a composer who is at the same time both long overdue and right now perfectly fit to be recorded properly: Gabriel Faure. The Faure Quartet has fond memories of these phases of self-exploration and laying the foundations of a piece. The quartet was able to afford the luxury of independent maturity and managed to transform the apparent shortcoming of such a fixed instrumentation into a quality. It is not a trio that treats itself to a pianist, neither is it a string quartet that gives one violin a temporary leave of absence, and nor is it a piano soloist who enhances inherent keyboard timbres by augmenting these with a few extra string players. It remains an ensemble that takes itself seriously in its particularity and benefits from the qualities of four characters who can stand up to each other even over long stretches of time. And it is a team that does not see itself as too superior not to practice the same thing over and over again until a point is reached at which an invisible boundary is crossed, one that leads from mere interpretation to actual embodiment.

Violinist Judith Ingolfsson and pianist Vladimir Stoupel are both soloists with accomplished international concert careers. They have also been equally successful since they began searching for new paths in chamber music together in 2006 and devoted themselves to the cultivation of an unusual repertoire. This undertaking also includes their project “Co cert-Centenaire.” It is dedicated to composers, whose lives were influenced by or lost during the First World War. This new box set combines the previously realeased Volumes 1 - 3 in a single release.