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Home CDE84675/6-2 Fauré, Chausson, Saint-Saëns Piano Quartets Fauré, Chausson, Saint-Saëns - 2 CD set
Gabriel Fauré Piano Quartet in C minor, Op.15 Piano Quartet in G minor, Op.45
Ernest Chausson Piano Quartet A major, Op.30
Camille Saint-Saëns Barcarolle for Piano Quartet, Op.108
Primrose Piano Quartet Susanne Stanzeleit - Piano Dorothea Vogel - Viola Andrew Fuller - Cello John Thwaites - Piano
The piano firm Erard dominated mid-nineteenth century Europe and France well into the twentieth century. All the composers featured in this disc owned Erard pianos and dealt regularly with the firm whose Director from the 1880s was Albert Blondel. Chausson is pictured with his family (he had five children) at his Paris apartment, 22 Boulevard de Courcelles, with his Erard 2.12 (7’) number 50621, manufactured in 1886.
The instrument used in this recording is Le grand modèle de Concert 2.6 (8’5’’) a 90 note straight-strung piano from G to C‘’’’ number 65566 sold on 29th December 1888 to Armstrong de Georges of Paris, restored by Frits Janmaat of Maison Erard (then in Amsterdam and now in Enkhuizen) in 2011, and bought by Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in 2022.
Only 444 such pianos were built but the make was influential. One became the concert piano at the Opera Garnier in Paris. Ravel’s works Jeux d’eau and Scarbo require the extra bottom notes (promoted also by Bösendorfer’s Imperial model) and the most successful concert pianist of all time, Ignacy Jan Paderewski, toured this model around the world (so that the model was sometimes nicknamed the Paderewski Erard) whilst also endorsing the later cross-strung Erard and indeed all other major manufacturers.
We used Bach/Lehman temperament for these recordings. Lehman’s adaption of Bach’s schematic “squiggle” penned at the top of the Well-Tempered Klavier manuscript and denoting the pureness of the fifths in equal temperament, tweaks a number of those notes which are troublesome in more remote keys, thus making them sweeter - at the expense of “spicing up” some near sharp keys (A and E major in particular). Truly "equal" temperament was not established until the twentieth century, and an understanding of temperaments contributes to an awareness of key characteristics and expressive chromatic harmony.
Erard were committed to straight-strung pianos (where all the strings run parallel to each other) and hand-built methods of construction. For example, whilst most piano manufactures embraced mass production and used machines to cut the felt that covers hammers from the 1870s, Erard were covering piano hammers by hand in the 1890s. The straight stringing gives greater clarity and affects pedalling, but what is more important still is the fundamental approach to construction. Where the later heavy cast iron frame allows the strings to be crossed under enormous tension, generating generalised sonority and power, the older pianos were based on wooden frames with steel strengthening. The strings are lighter and looser, with more colourful overtones , and speak more independently for themselves, but without generating so much volume.
The Primrose Piano Quartet believes that only with the lighter sound and shallower key of an Erard can a hugely virtuoso romantic chamber music piano part, such as that of the Chausson, be properly understood. In order to maintain good balance and musical momentum the piano’s thousands of notes must fly, which comes naturally on an Erard but only antithetically on a modern piano. Furthermore, such a piano releases string players to use covered gut on most of their strings, as we do here, as well as to embrace stylistic practices of the time, such as portamento (or sliding between notes).
It’s particularly appropriate that the string style here is influenced by singing as the composers on this disc wrote such famous songs, and the singing style of that time was less powerful, did not favour excessive vibrato to enhance projection, but was more intimately lyrical with notes often connected by portamento. Nineteenth century piano playing styles typically included asynchronicity (where the left hand might be played before the right), unwritten arpeggiation, presque plaqué (notes played “almost together”) and inégale (where rhythms can be treated freely), all of which feature on this recording. With an elastic pulse and freely lyrical style we aimed to capture something of the playing of romanticism’s Golden Age.
Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) Piano Quartet No. 1 in C minor, Op.15 Piano Quartet No. 2 in G minor, Op.45
Gabriel Fauré was living and working in France during a period when music was changing dramatically, making the transition from early romantic style through the revolutionary harmonic advances of Wagner to the early twentieth century modernism of Schönberg, Debussy and Stravinsky. Fauré was content to write largely in the classical forms that he had inherited, to pour “new wine into old bottles”, revelling in his lyric gift and a preoccupation shared with his compatriots for colour and timbre. Equally French was his dislike for the pompous or overblown. Often his music is suggestive, ambiguous or understated, and nowhere is this clearer than in the Requiem, one of the most widely known pieces of classical music.
He was trained as an organist and choirmaster but was always an unconventional young man who was once sacked from his position as a church organist in Rennes for appearing at a service in evening dress, having come straight from an all-night ball. As a student he avoided the notorious and stifling conservatism of the Paris Conservatoire, studying with Saint-Saëns at the École Niedermeyer where he received an unusually broad training, including study of Renaissance and Baroque music and the great German composers. (Copland described Fauré as the French Brahms).
His interest in chamber music spanned his entire career from the first Violin Sonata, published in 1877, to his String Quartet, published posthumously in 1925. A passionate pianist, his particularly beautiful music for strings and piano draws both on his sense of the song and his concept of a particular melody's interaction with its accompaniment. The often arpeggiated piano parts seem to break the music into tiny pieces, like a musical kaleidoscope. The unusual distribution of parts between the two hands and interesting finger substitutions are probably due to his training as an organist and the fact that he was ambidextrous.
The first Piano Quartet is a youthful work written in the period 1876 to 1879 and revised for publication in1883. It is interesting to note that this piece was written, like the quartets of Brahms, during a time of emotional trauma. An engagement to Marianne Viardot was broken off after a five year romance.
On hearing it for the first time almost everyone is bowled over by its emotional exuberance and sheer brilliance. The opening has a very romantic, richly orchestral statement of the main theme by unison strings which is soon transformed into a beautifully gentle melody. One of the outstanding qualities of Fauré’s writing for the piano quartet medium is this inventiveness with textures and colours. The music unfolds through a kind of continuous melodic development, or thematic transformation, in the course of which the four instruments engage and combine with each other contrapuntally and conversationally in a never-endingly fascinating way. However exciting, Fauré’s music remains lyrical, sentiments in the music subtly shifting through modulation and felicitous moments within the almost continuous flow of notes, perhaps side-stepping into distant worlds (here a particularly dreamy passage within the first movement’s development section) or summoning up the mother of all exciting codas (to the Finale).
The second movement begins with a light-hearted Scherzo. The melody is carried by the piano, accompanied by pizzicato and dovetailing in the strings. The trio section is again light with muted strings suggesting a salon or even café atmosphere, ripe for lightly speeding bows and generous vibrato. Characteristically, the piano outlines this melody in delicate arpeggios. The melancholic Adagio, opened by the cello, prefigures Fauré’s iconic use of the cello in his Elegy Op. 24, also in C minor. Florent Schmitt writes in Cobbett’s Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music “Were this not very long movement - nine pages only - to be lost to us, an immeasurable void would be created in the music of the nineteenth century”. His concluding Allegro molto opens with a racing, undulating piano part bordering on a moto perpetuo. This is contrasted with a second, more singing theme. These two themes are worked out, building to a climax in the piano part with freely rhetorical arpeggiation, then restarting the coda with some gentler material. Once again, the music intensifies for an impassioned ending.
Unlike Franck and Chausson who embraced Wagnerian chromaticism, Fauré’s mature style, already evident here in his second Piano Quartet (completed in 1887) stretches and challenges functional tonality but with concentrated, interior ambiguity, and the austerity and complexity of ancient church modes. He offers the ineffable alongside the ecstatic.
Whilst the piano writing retains passages of rhapsodic romantic writing, and indeed of moto perpetuo (for example in the Scherzo), there is also a new concentration and intensity, not least in the demisemiquaver figuration with which the work begins, the opening theme stated in unison strings, as it had been in Op.15. The more serious atmosphere of this work is also reflected in the Scherzo, which had been charming and relaxed in Op.15 but is now more driven and concise. Cobbett’s Survey quotes Louis Aquettant’s poetic sketches of both Scherzos, the earlier “With a buzzing of fairy insects it starts off on a moonbeam, in a Shakespearean glade” and the G minor “Wild and full of mocking laughter, it whirls in mad gyration, a round of demons or a giddy dance of Aïssanahs”. In the slow movement (now a capacious sixteen pages), Fauré’s very personal harmonic idiom blossoms fully, and the Finale is also polyphonically and tonally extraordinary.
Ernest Chausson (1855-1899) Piano Quartet in A major, Op.30
"There are moments when I feel myself driven by a kind of feverish instinct, as if I had the presentiment of being unable to attain my goal, or of attaining it too late.”
During his short career, Parisian composer Ernest Chausson created six chamber compositions, works of refined lyrical poetry that are significant contributions to the repertoire. Chausson came from a well-to-do family and comfortable circumstances, which throughout his life made it unnecessary for him to earn a living as a musician. Although interested in music from a young age, Chausson pursued law studies at his father's behest. In 1877, he was sworn in as a lawyer in Paris; in the same year, he wrote his first work, the unpublished song Lilacs. The impulse to devote himself to composition was sparked in 1879 when he attended a performance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in Munich and met Vincent d’Indy there. Chausson entered the Paris Conservatory in the following year and began studies with Jules Massenet, but it was d’Indy’s introduction to the circle around César Franck and his private lessons with that master which were much more influential.
The Piano Quartet, written in 1897, blends serene classicism with rhapsodic lyricism. The first movement, animated by alternating rhythm patterns, develops two pentatonic themes. The second movement, “very calm”, explores two eloquent ideas that are alternately reflective and touched with pathos. The third movement, "simple and without haste", is a light and elegant Scherzo based on a melody suggesting Spanish folksong. The Finale, remarkable in its rhythmic flexibility, features a second subject that is closely derived from the second subject of the first movement. However, the Cyclic Form so beloved of the Franck circle comes most notably into its own in the final pages. As Tchaikovsky proved with his Piano Trio in A minor of 1882, a good tune is always worth hearing again. Chausson’s memorable slow movement melody first re-enters very softly on the viola, is then taken up by violin and cello, but concludes the piece in the most dramatically elevated style, as had Tchaikovsky, with unison strings surrounded by torrents of piano notes. Some of the criticisms levelled at Franck, of being a “modulating machine” of endless sequences and musical filler, apply equally to Chausson. But Franck wrote the most popular romantic violin sonata in the repertoire, and in his monumental Piano Quartet Chausson created one of the most ambitious, personal, and compelling piano quartets that we have.
As secretary of the Société Nationale de Musique (an organisation founded by Saint-Saëns and others to promote the performance of French instrumental music) from 1886, Chausson became a full-fledged member of the Parisian musical community. His salon became a regular meeting place for literary and musical notables including Mallarmé, Monet, Turgenev, Rodin, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Duparc, Dukas, Debussy, Albéniz, pianist Alfred Cortot and violinist Eugène Ysaÿe. When only 44 years old, Chausson died while staying at one of his country retreats, the Château de Mioussets, in Limay, Yvelines. Riding his bicycle downhill, Chausson hit a brick wall and died instantly.
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835 - 1921) Barcarolle Op.108 for Piano Quartet
The Barcarolle Op.108 was initially composed for harmonium, piano, violin and cello. The harmonium had first been patented by Alexandre-François Debain in 1842 and become very popular in the salons.
In 1853, Saint-Saëns composed Trois Morceaux pour harmonium, which were often played by Antonio Jeanbernat. This musician from Barcelona also organised two festivals devoted to Saint-Saëns. By way of thanks, the composer made him the dedicatée of the Barcarolle for violin, cello, harmonium and piano, op.108 (1898), in which the harmonium generally played long chords or the crotchet-quaver rhythmic cell. At the first performance, organised by the La Trompette musical society on 18 May 1898, Saint-Saëns played the part of the “expressive organ” (as it was called then).
Ten years later, he wanted to give this piece a new lease of life and wrote to Durand on 18 December 1908: “It may well deserve to be better known and I shall see if it’s not possible to give it a more practical form; the harmonium as a concert and salon instrument seems to me to have lost ground and I will attempt to do without it.” He replaced the harmonium with a viola and declared to the publisher on 10 January 1909: “You were complaining to me that I had not given you any more works; here is one. A brand new Barcarolle, a reworking of an old one. I think it has found its true form now and will be more harmonious with a viola. No one knew that Barcarolle and this will have the effect of a new piece.”