Faure / Franck: String Quartets

"This is a wonderfully played pairing of perhaps the two greatest of all French string quartets. It is a measure of the outstanding quality of the Dante Quartet that both works are projected as vividly and immediately as they are. There's such a passionate involvement about their playing, such belief in the music's outstanding qualities, which not only makes light of the structural challenges of the Franck, but treats the rarefied world of the Faure as if it were the most naturally expressive thing imaginable. It's an outstanding disc." The Guardian, 1st August 2008

"No dithering with the Dante Quartet in their Hyperion debut: they plunge into whatever they play with passion, energy and communal spirit. These two late quartets from Fauré and Franck make a canny coupling. The Franck dazzles with its boisterous invention; the Fauré cools brows with its thoughtful restraint. To both the players bring the same expertise and vast colour range. And the recording's superb. If you like the repertoire, don't hesitate." The Times, 1st August 2008 ****

"The Dante Quartet are superb advocates, especially in the Franck, where they are without peer among modern accounts."
(BBC Music Magazine Awards 2009: Chamber Award Winner)

"…from the opening bars of the Franck we feel the intensity of the Dante's commitment. In the Fauré there's a nice ebb and flow of feeling as the music progresses… It's certainly playing of great accomplishment." Gramophone Magazine

The great French composers Fauré and Franck have generally been cast as total opposites, but in fact they had much in common. Neither were really men of the theatre, nor were they natural symphonists, nor were they flashy orchestrators in the Berlioz or Rimsky-Korsakov tradition. But both cultivated what the French call 'intériorité', which one could translate as 'intimacy', though this loses the sense of deep reflection, even of transcendence, immanent in the French term. Finally, as it turned out, the last works of both were string quartets. Recorded together here, these beautiful final works demonstrate a thorough maturity of spirit and talent in both composers.

Franck's quartet breaks new ground, particularly in the complex structure of the first movement. The discourse is also shot through with sudden silences, as though questioning the propriety of the whole enterprise-silences whose force was surely not lost on the young Debussy, who a few years later was to claim silence as one of his most fruitful discoveries. The String Quartet in E minor by Fauré is almost backward-looking in its modal tonality, and a model of 'intériorité'.

Winner of the prestigious Royal Philharmonic Society Award for Chamber Music in 2007, the Dante Quartet is known for its imaginative programming and the emotional intensity of its performances. The group was founded in 1995 at the International Musicians' Seminar at Prussia Cove, Cornwall. This is its first recording for Hyperion.