Fauré Nocturnes and Barcarolles; Dolly Suite, Op. 56* Marc-André Hamelin (piano), *Cathy Fuller (piano) Hyperion CDA68331-2 158:09 mins (2 discs)
In the early 1930s the great pianist Artur Schnabel said to his pupil, the young William Glock, ‘we must teach you how to play your rubato in time.’ Even this neat encapsulation of the ideal rubato as an ornament, not an interruption, fails to solve the problem in Fauré’s case. On the one hand, the only recording currently available of him playing the piano (YouTube, ‘Fauré plays Fauré’) gives just his Pavane and his first Barcarolle, in both of which rubato is pretty much absent; testimony from pupils such as Marguerite Long also claims that he liked to maintain a steady tempo throughout a piece. On the other hand, he himself complained of people treating him as a ‘twilight composer’, reluctant ever to cause surprise, while his son Philippe insisted that pianists should ‘jouer le drame’, ‘bring out the drama’. Marc-André Hamelin leans towards the second practice, while sensibly following Schnabel’s advice. The two sets of Nocturnes and Barcarolles give us a resumé of Fauré’s compositional progress, from charming, tune-oriented pieces to the later ones driven, according to recent analysts, by ‘harmonic distortion’. Certainly, melody increasingly takes a back seat, in favour of what sometimes sound like abstruse mathematical games of Fauré’s own invention. But it is particularly in these that Hamelin’s superb technique and no doubt many hours of careful thought pay dividends, magisterially impressing on us the power and beauty of this music, which traces a path that no composer after Fauré chose, or perhaps dared, to tread.
Roger Nichols