Le Sage, Ebene Quartet Faure: Piano Quintets (2012)

Gabriel Fauré has frequently been termed “the father of Impressionism”; the Parisian music world of Fauré’s time was characterised by emancipation from German 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. Fauré shows himself from his Late Romantic and passionate sides: already the beginning impetuously rushes forward, but for all its passion it quite strictly and surprisingly follows the formal conventions in its polyphony. The Mozart Piano Quartet skilfully combines the traditional with the new; in three-dimensional sound the enormous dynamic expressive breadth of the ensemble develops its full potential.

These readings of Fauré's two late piano quintets by the Schubert Ensemble of London are paradoxical. The group's performances are strong-willed and purposeful in the outer movements, particularly in the C minor Quintet's ever accelerating Finale, yet soft-focused and sensuous in the central slow movements, especially the D minor Quintet's deeply dolorous Adagio. The tone changes from robustly incisive to sweetly sonorous, the ensemble from vigorously muscular to smoothly refined, and the rhythms from sharply accented to softly undulating.

Composed in 1879, the Piano Quintet in F minor by César Franck belongs to the fruitful final period of his creative life. It heralded the start of an impressive sequence of late orchestral and chamber pieces which set the seal upon his career. The Piano Quintet was premiered in Paris on 17 January 1880 by the Marsick Quartet with Saint-Saëns at the piano. During the last quarter of the 19th century and into the 1920s, it was Gabriel Fauré who made the most substantial and lasting contribution to French chamber music. Faurés Piano Quintet no.1 renews the powerful concentration of his earlier Piano Quartets in its outer movements, while also looking forward to the composers later works in the sophisticated phrasing and chromaticism of its extended Adagio. Vibrant and spirited, it may be counted among the composers finest creations.

Dvorak was only 30 when writing his first A major Piano Quintet, given its premiere in Prague in 1872. Dissatisfied, even with his attempted revision some 15 years later, he chose not to publish it but to take up the challenge anew in the now universally loved A major Quintet (Op. 81), completed in the early autumn of 1887. How good, all the same, that the earlier work eventually (in 1922) found rescuers, and that both quintets can now be compared and enjoyed on CD. The latest version comes from Rudolf Firkusny (long recognized as ''the world's foremost exponent of Czech music'') and America's youthful Ridge Quartet, and what warm and characterful playing it is too.

Schumann's Piano Quintet was one of the earliest examples of the combination of piano with a string quartet - Boccherini, Dussek and Hummel had each produced one, and Schubert used the double bass in his Trout Quintet. It instantly became one of Schumann's most popular works. It was composed at a time of almost feverish industry - along with the quintet, he composed his three String Quartets Op.41, the Piano Quartet and a set of Fantasy Pieces for piano trio, all in 1842. Dvorak's Op.81 Piano Quintet stems from his attempt to revise an earlier work in A major from 1872.

For the fourth and penultimate volume of his Fauré series, Eric Le Sage has been joined by Alexandre Tharaud, Emmanuel Pahud, and François Salque, long-standing accomplices, in order to record these pieces for four hands. Recipient of numerous prizes both in France and abroad, this complete Fauré series is already asserting itself as a reference for the interpretation of Gabriel Fauré’s chamber music with piano.

Mozart’s piano concertos form a set that is not just exceptional but absolutely unique in the history of music: from No. 9 to No. 27, all are definitive masterpieces. According to H.C. Robbins Landon, an eminent specialist in the composer’s life and work, ‘It is above all their immense stylistic diversity that places Mozart’s piano concertos above and beyond those of his contemporaries’. What these scores also share is their position at a crossroads for strongly impacting influences: that of the symphony, encouraging Mozart to make lavish use of the orchestra; the wind bands of the Imperial court, shaping his enhanced role for the woodwinds; and the influence of the opera, whose styles he worked into these concertos, often treating the dialogue between piano and orchestra as if they were stage characters. In this new recording, Eric Le Sage is joined by the Gävle Symfoniorkester to perform the 17th and 24th concertos for piano and orchestra by the Salzburg composer.

This unique collection features a representative selection of early Romantic piano quintets, ranging from the astronomically popular Trout Quintet by Schubert to lesser known works from Hummel, Ries, Cramer, Limmer, Dussek, and Onslow.