Faure: Quintets with Piano

GRAMOPHONE AWARD FINALIST 2013: Chamber

"Le Sage offers consistently limpid playing, so unmistakeably French...Everywhere the pacing sounds utterly natural: Le Sage and the Ebene are the most persuasive guides through sometimes daunting terrain. This is a clear front-runner in this repertoire."
(Editor's Choiice Gramophone March 2013)

In a genre set by Boccherini and represented in the nineteenth century by the masterpieces of Schumann, Brahms and Franck, Gabriel Fauré composed two scores that were very different from his early romances and the evanescent 'lullaby of death' that is the Requiem.

The Piano Quintet op. 89 remains little known, for reasons related to its composition as much as to its history. Regarded by Koechlin as one of Fauré's finest work, it serves as a transition to the composer's final stylistic period.

Opus 115, surprisingly less melancholy than its predecessor, is one of the composer's last productions. In the evening of his life Faure demonstrated his supreme mastery and prodigious creative power, giving French chamber music, which he served so well, one of its finest monuments.