– Composer: Gabriel Urbain Fauré (12 May 1845 — 4 November 1924)
– Performers: Ysaÿe Quartet[Guillaume Sutre (violin), Luc-Marie Aguera(violin), Miguel Da Silva(viola), Marc Coppey(cello)], Pascal Rogé(piano)
– Year of recording: 1995- 12
– Recording Venue: Salle Wagram, Paris
Piano Quintet No.1 in D minor, Op.89, completed in 21 April 1896.
00:25 – I. Molto moderato
12:48 – II. Adagio
24:15 – III. Allegretto moderato
Perhaps nothing else in Fauré’s oeuvre cost him so much trouble for seeming so effortlessly spontaneous than the Piano Quintet No. 1. As early as 1887, he was jotting the melody of the work’s Finale. And by the end of 1890, the work was sketched almost completely, though only the exposition of the first movement had been fully composed. Fauré’s son Emmanuel recalled hearing this fragment tried out at home by the Quatuor Ysaÿe. “But I only heard it that once,” he told leading Fauré scholar Jean-Michel Nectoux. “One day I plucked up my courage and timidly sang to my father the first bars of this ‘vanished’ tune. I’ll never forget how he threw his arms around me and embraced me, then sat down at the piano and played me the whole of the opening paragraph.” It is indeed a memorable passage, with its quietly rippling arpeggios over which a serenely beguiling melody floats, like a messenger from a bourne quite as fantastic as that of Yeats’ “sleepy country, where swans fly round/Coupled with golden chains, and sing as they fly.” The development of this donnée seems to have been the sticking point. In the upshot, the Quintet was set aside for the Verlaine cycles, the Cinq Mélodies “de Venise” (1891) and La Bonne chanson (1892-1894), which open on yet other strange enchantments. Though the work was briefly taken up again in 1896, it required intense labor through the summer holidays from 1903 to 1905 before Fauré had shaped the elements of this over-rich opus to his satisfaction.
The first-movement Molto moderato laces the ethereality of the opening with the involvements of a second and, eventually, a third theme that do not so much contrast with as complement the first theme to elaborate a spellbinding demesne. The dream deepens in the great central Adagio as a berceuse-like melody makes modulatory explorations, simultaneously raising the temperature of the first movement to a note of quiet passion that becomes more rapt as a more animated countermelody enters into dialogue. After so much penumbral introspection, the gaiety of the concluding D major Allegretto moderato falls like a sudden shaft of sunlight. A rondo, its refrain, possesses the engaging ingenuousness of a chanson populaire. Moments of drama, with divagations into the minor, lend substance to insouciance and a contrasting radiance to the springing giddiness of the coda. Part of the Piano Quintet No. 1’s fascination owes to the inspiration of Fauré at the most opulent period of his career — the Verlaine years — worked with a cunning, old-masterly hand as the composer embarked upon his final manner. The casual hearer, for instance, will be delighted by an unbroken arch of glorious melody, while the close listener will be drawn into a transparently fluent web wrought of the subtlest contrapuntal art. Dedicated to Eugène Ysaÿe, the Piano Quintet No. 1 was given its premiere in Brussels by the Quatuor Ysaÿe, with Blanche Selva at the piano, on March 23, 1906.