Gabriel Fauré
wrote a lot of piano music, and complete recordings of it are rare, with just a few in the decades before the release of this one by pianist
Lucas Debargue
in 2024. That may have drawn listeners; the album landed on classical best-seller charts in the spring of that year. Another draw was
Debargue
's unusual piano, a modern instrument called the "Opus 102" by
Stephen Paulello
. As the name suggests, it has 102 keys. That doesn't affect
Fauré
, who wrote for the usual 88, but the piano also has certain details of construction that allow an unusually wide range of tone colors.
contributes pages and pages of notes, including descriptions of each individual piece included on the four volumes of
, but he doesn't really offer a coherent argument for why this piano was correct. So listeners can form their own judgments. This was a pandemic-era project, and perhaps
felt that the new piano enabled him to enter more deeply into
's music than would otherwise have been possible. In any event, he does well at creating an overarching direction in the music as a whole, playing
's pieces in chronological order by opus number. He gives a sense of the development of the composer's pianistic language, which continued to explore
Chopin
's genres (principally the Barcarolle and the Nocturne) but took on deeper layers harmonically and texturally later in his life. The listener sympathetic to
's approach will have the feeling of entering a murky, mysterious, almost spiritual or sepulchral world in the later parts of the program.
Sony Classical
and producer
Hans Kipfer
back
up with excellent studio sound that captures all the tone colors. Many pieces sound unlike earlier recordings of
, and listeners owe it to themselves to at least check the recording out. ~ James Manheim