I had not focused on these complex set of pieces until recently when the just kind of appeared on my mix one day as i sat reading a novel. Eventually they cornered me and I had to pay attention. Here is a solid assessment in Gramophone on which are the best versions:
For Debussy, Fauré was a ‘master of charms’, his Ballade as erotic as a woman’s loose shoulder strap, while even Liszt – most far-sighted of critics – demurred before music which offered too few instant returns. At a later date Cortot may have written rapturously about Fauré (the First Impromptu’s ‘stylised coquetry and regret’ or the Third Impromptu’s central calm, ‘like an avenue of fans folding and unfolding’) but much to the composer’s chagrin he played little of his music. In a burst more of sadness than of rage, Fauré wrote to him saying, ‘you allow my music to pile up without actually playing it’. This desertion even included music dedicated to Cortot, including the bleak and unaccommodating Ninth Nocturne. Horowitz once told me that he played the entire piano works of Fauré in private but his public offering consisted of only three works, proof for some that he was primarily interested in the externals of music. For French pianist Michel Béroff, Fauré’s music expresses little beyond a ‘vague perfume’, an opinion that should have earned him chastisement from his long-term two-piano partner Jean-Philippe Collard, who has recorded the complete piano works. Joan Chissell, for long a critic for Gramophone, felt that with Fauré, ‘a little goes a long way’, while a German lady ‘professor’ who I had the misfortune to meet as a jury colleague in France told me that if she suggested such music to her students they would walk out. For such people Fauré’s outward convention and inner audacity, together with the move from what they see as salonish origins to obscurity, is hardly worth the effort or challenge.
And that challenge, too, is considerable, The difficulty in performance is a major factor in Fauré’s neglect. Any pianist who has ever studied or attempted to memorise Fauré will tell you of their often desperate fight for fluency in patterns which rarely lie easily under the hand, and for shot-silk modulations and rhythmic ambiguities that can fox even the most skilled player. And all this in music which, as Liszt hinted, is hardly designed to win easy applause. The public has understandably little notion of the intensive work required to bring such an elusive task to vivid and meaningful life. Regrettably, if again understandably, many pianists dip their toes in Fauré (the early, more accessible Fauré with the Second and Third Impromptus for preference) before retreating into less unsettling, commercially more viable territory for a greater sense of musical terra firma.
Again, and at a more basic level, such a plethora of problems is compounded by record companies whose sleeves and illustrations perpetuate a misleading emphasis and impression. Sylvan woods, garlands of flowers and over-familiar portraits of Fauré as an elderly white-haired prelate hardly hint at the whole story. And it is greatly to Paul Crossley’s credit, for example, that he insisted on having reproductions of the often darkly disturbing paintings of Caspar David Friedrich for his covers. These at any rate suggest paradise lost and hardly regained.
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