FAURE: Sonatas for violin and piano – Isabelle Faust, violin/ Florent Boffard, piano – Harmonia mundi

by | Sep 2, 2008 | Classical CD Reviews | 0 comments

FAURE: Sonatas for violin and piano – Isabelle Faust, violin/ Florent Boffard, piano – Harmonia mundi HMA1951741, 60:41 *****:

Forty-one years separate the composition of the two violin sonatas on this CD. During that lengthy interval the old regimes of Europe collapsed and a more bourgeois middle-class Europe replaced them. A new world of music was created as well. Faure’s languid and refined aesthetic sensibility was not immune to these influences. But even with such a broad gulf of time separating their creation, they are both instantly recognizable as pieces by Faure. His basic musical syntax is so personal as to be utterly sui generis. Nevertheless, the World War that destroyed a generation of young men left its mark even on him. Faure’s second violin sonata, composed in 1916-1917, is a sad and strangely withdrawn work, with the tragic view of life deeply encoded in its very fabric.The first violin sonata composed in 1875 is a romantic work of more conventional beauty, slightly more earthbound in the directness of its musical vocabulary.

These two violin sonatas feature some of Faure’s finest work. Their music unfolds with delicate mystery, like the intimate murmurs of a half-heard whisper in the night. His beautiful, enigmatic slow movements feature music that seems to shimmer in the half-light of a barely remembered dream. Faure creates vast seas of repose periodically disturbed by a flurry of troubled beauty. At other times there is an uneasiness that communicates itself in music of fluid anxiety: fast, nervous sections that frame the bucolic beauty of the more contemplative moments. Both sonatas feature this emotional fragmentation. It is as if Faure distrusts the very refinement that is the hallmark.of his music.

Isabelle Faust on violin and Florent Boffard on piano have the measure of this elegant and reticent music. The two sonatas and the shorter works that fill up this disc require a fluidity of technique coupled with a poetic Gallic sensibility. They are both beautifully attuned to Faure’s mastery of narrow dynamic changes, used by the composer to convey a structural forward motion and a restrained expressiveness peculiar to his music. The two musicians have a treasurable ability to convey both the beauty of Faure’s music as well as its use of nuance to hint at unseen worlds and inexpressible thoughts and ideas. This foreshadowing of Debussy is merely another aspect of Faure’s greatness as a composer. Faust and Boffard bring to mind other celebrated masters of Faure’s music – such as Domus – in their beauty of tone, in the richness and depth of their instrumental technique and their sheer sensuality of sound. Harmonia mundi’s engineers have created a close, warm and reverberant recording that is a pleasure to listen to. This is an exemplary CD that fans of Faure will greatly enjoy. Strongly recommended.

— Mike Birman
 

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