Eric Le Sage

The sonatas for violin and piano, which were composed on holidays to lakeside forests in the midst of sublime nature where Brahms loved to spend his summers, contain all the contradictions unique to the man who described himself as a wanderer: daring and discipline, naïveté and sagacity, melancholy and joy. Pierre Fouchenneret and Eric Le Sage embark fervently on this adventure with this new volume in this crazy journey through Brahms’s complete chamber music works, charted by B Records. Of the project, Pierre Fouchenneret writes: “One crazy day, a few of us decided to embark on a project which, at the time, some people deemed impossible to achieve: to perform all of Brahms’s chamber music within only a few months. Every concert would be recorded… we are now a company, as in the theatre, bonded by an unstoppable urge, a definite notion of boldness, a shared perception of chamber music and a love for the repertoire.”

With their poetry, their passonate and intimate lyricism, their refined style that gradually reveals hidden depths, the thirteen Nocturnes of Gabriel Fauré are the most significant group of works in his oeuvre for solo piano. Composed over a period of forty-six years (between 1875 and 1821), they bear witness to the composer’s remarkable stylistic evolution. From a form of expression rooted in romanticism, to an aesthetic fully aligned with 20th-century modernity, Fauré can be said to have shaped his musical personality like a sculptor. His Nocturnes are not all of equal importance, but as a whole their diversity and development offer a perfect panorama of his art. Éric Le Sage, one of the French piano school’s main representatives, whose many recordings for Alpha include the complete chamber music of Fauré, here interprets the repertoire closest to his heart.