Faure - Piano Quintet 1 [Roge/Quatuor Ysaye]
Now here's something to get really excited about, some chamber music from Faure, the Piano Quartets i know fairly well [from Domus / Hyperion], but the Piano Quintets are another matter, they still remain unfamiliar to me, so it was so good to get to know them on this Sunday walk to Church, Faure has this unique sound i hear in no other Composer, he has these odd almost sour accidentals punctuated here and there, which make a nice bittersweet sadness at times, well worth getting to know deeper.
Pascal Roge is French, born in 1951, he recorded this work in 1995, the booklet shows a picture of some rural church, looks like France, with lavender fields in the foreground, these Decca Double issues are really clever and useful, bringing together all of Faure's Piano Quartets and Quintets.
I feel that the First Piano Quintet is superior to the Second, cast in three movements instead of the usual four in all the other works here, lovely rippling piano figures in the opening movement, with the strings in sadness mode, typical Faure, and a beautiful idea, and again delicate piano figures in the slow central movement, like drops of rain, but it's the last movement that i found tremendous, it finds Faure in happy mode, with a very simple almost childlike theme on the piano as an introduction [0:00-0:37], and yet it's so wonderfully a memorable tune, it's really stuck in my brain now, after this there's what sounds like to me as a set of variations on this original piano introduction theme, right after the theme there's a low string serenade [0:37-1:16] very soothing, and variation 1 maybe?, and after this the piano tinkles away in its high register like a musical box [1:16-1:51], very effective, variation 2 possibly?, and then there's a waltz [1:51-2:16], superbly shifting into a sweeter key, and sweeping us across the dance floor [variation 3?], and so it continues, until the opening piano theme comes back again [4:33+], and the whole thing breaks up into what sounds like a fugue for the second half of the movement, certainly less structured, themes and ideas come and go in quicker succession, just before a sort of finale right at the end, there's a moment of repose, where the music slows down and goes quiet [7:56+], the lower strings play a sort of coda, all round an interesting and musically fulfilling end to Faure's first Piano Quintet.
Here's the third movement Allegretto Moderato being played on YouTube.
