Angela Hewitt FAURÉ Piano Music

For a long time I have wanted to record my favourite solo piano works by Gabriel Fauré. I was first introduced to his music at the age of fifteen when my teacher, Jean-Paul Sévilla, gave me the Ballade to learn. He was a great lover of Fauré’s music, and we were privileged to hear him perform so much of it in Ottawa, where I grew up. He introduced all his students not only to Fauré’s piano works, but also to the chamber music and especially the songs. I vividly remember buying the LPs of the complete mélodies and listening to them time and time again, following the words and translations (being an avid student of French). I passed many a happy hour in Fauré’s company. All of the works on this album I learned by my mid-twenties, and most of them much earlier. They are old friends.

When you mention the piano music of Fauré to people, whether they are professional musicians or not, you usually get one of two responses: either they don’t know it, or else they consider it to be little more than ‘salon’ music. Those who do know it, and who love it deeply, will defend Fauré’s artistry and achievements with great passion.

It is amazing to think that when Fauré was born in 1845 Schumann had just completed his Piano Concerto, Chopin had written his third Piano Sonata, and Berlioz La damnation de Faust. By the time Fauré died in 1924 Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire was already twelve years old. The world around him also became a different place during those eighty years. Fauré remained remarkably unaffected by political events, with the exception of World War I. In 1908, in a letter to his son, he wrote: ‘For me, art, and especially music, exists to elevate us as far as possible above everyday existence.

A musician will recognize, within a few seconds, the music of Fauré. It is unmistakable thanks to its harmonic language and melodic contours. Along with the music of Bach, his piano works are among the most difficult for pianists to memorize. Constantly shifting harmonies, enharmonic changes pushed to the extreme, slight variants in passages that are otherwise similar—all of these things, added to the sheer technical difficulties, probably put a lot of people off. It is an art that is made, as one of his best biographers, Jean-Michel Nectoux, puts it, ‘of grandeur and refinement, in the image of that of Marcel Proust who would “become intoxicated” by this music, as he once wrote to Fauré’.

(Angela Hewitt)