“Music consists in raising us as far as possible above what is. I carry within me a certain desire for things that do not exist.” Gabriel Fauré

 

Lovers of the music of Gabriel Fauré are a little like bikers who wave at one another when they meet on the road. A friendly, informal club of people who have let the Faurean tide penetrate their souls and rock them through the vicissitudes of life . . . But how to convey to someone who is not gripped by this ‘song of the soul’ the love of an art so imperiously inward? How to explain that the renouncement of instrumental colour is intended solely to sustain the harmonic colour, that the renouncement of thematic dialectics and of all formal rhetoric serves the flow of the curve, the endless melody? That the poetic values of Fauré’s music (tenderness, elation, flow, horizon, curve, intoxication, night, hope, ineffability) make it worth renouncing more concrete, more palpable attachments. That the different values of sentiment and of its internal expansion are worth just as much as the rhetorical constructs dear to analysts and to Beethovenians. That the curved time with its uninterrupted ascents offered by the music of Gabriel Fauré is the guarantor of pure, essential music. That the Faurean phrase, long, conjoint and seamless, is unprecedented in classical melodic style.

 

This disc contains the complete works of Gabriel Faure for cello and piano, including the famous Elegie. There are superb performances from cellist Xavier Gagnepain and pianist Jean-Michel Dayez.

 

Notable for his wide-ranging curiosity, Xavier Gagnepain pursues his passion for music in a multitude of directions. Soloist, pupil of Maurice Gendron and prizewinner at international competitions (Munich and São Paulo), he is also a committed chamber musician as a member of the Rosamonde Quartet.

 

Jean-Michel Dayez trained at the Chapelle Musicale Reine Élisabeth in Brussels (piano) and the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris (classes in accompaniment, harmony and counterpoint) and has been a passionate exponent of chamber music since boyhood.