Note from Brad: Gabriel Fauré – Horizons II
I hope you are all well out there. It’s a dream to be touring Europe with my old friends and colleagues Joshua Redman, Christian McBride and Brian Blade. They are an inspiration and joy to play with every night and the audiences have been warm and supportive.
I’d like to put some wonderful music on your radar from the one-of-a-kind French composer Gabriel Fauré, who’s been a big influence on my writing and playing. Horizons II is a 3 CD set that was released several months ago, and includes much of Fauré’s chamber music, beautifully played by musicians Simon Zaoui, Pierre Fouchenneret, Raphaël Merlin and the Quatour Strada.
Here they are in action, playing the dreamy slow movement of Fauré’s Quintet for Piano and Strings, Op. 115:
Their playing is deeply felt, luxurious and warm in all the right places but never overly sentimental. This is a great addition to the Fauré recordings. In my estimation, Fauré’s music still has more to offer us that we have not discovered. I wrote a short note along with other musicians about Fauré’s music and its impact on me and you can read it here.
Thanks everyone! All the best, Brad
Read Brad’s Liner Notes for the Album:
Fauré – Catcher of Dreams
Any new recording of Fauré’s chamber music is always welcome. There are many more fresh insights for us to discover. On this recording, the depth of these musicians’ understanding, and the generous engagement with the deep emotion in the music is immediately apparent. As someone who has wrestled with Fauré’s Piano Nocturnes for years, it strikes me that the challenge is not to avoid being saccharine or overwrought, the way it might be with so-called romantic composers (how much utility does this term have for Fauré?). On the contrary: the challenge is to really go “all the way in” to the music, and not shy away from its singular, sometimes all-consuming vision.
Fauré…the great underrated composer, the quiet giant. My discovery of him as a developing jazz musician was independent of Ravel and Debussy – two other French titans more commonly associated with jazz. On my path, he was a bridge between something more German – certainly Schumann and Brahms – and something as of yet unknown on the other side. His oeuvre is unquestionably “French” in character, yet also essentially unclassifiable. One could say that Fauré ends with Fauré, in the same way some speak of Brahms. I do not explicitly hear his influence in a continuing direct lineage, although I may be wrong about that. Yet: I hear his spirit in music outside the classical realm – in the saudade feeling of Antonio Carlos Jobim, in the nostalgic melancholy that embedded in many of Leo Ferré’s chansons, or in the wistful music of Michel Legrand, for example. I really believe that Fauré’s music is still of the future, in a way that other composers who straddled the 19th and 20th centuries are not. His chamber music in particular, included here, is a stone as of yet only partially unturned.
In any case, Fauré presents a bridge to much of the music I compose and improvise, music commonly called jazz. What has influenced me most is his harmonic palette, unlike any other: strange, enchanting, at times inexplicable, even confounding. You look at what’s on the page in some passages, and you say, “How did he get from point A to point B?” Some will disagree, but for me, Fauré is essentially a harmonist, notwithstanding his melodic gift. We find this in his slow movements most strikingly: The long, languorous melodies, played in octaves by the strings, are more like canopies that stretch over and protect the fruit below.
There is little variation in melodic activity, for example, throughout the development in Movement III of Piano Quintet Op. 115 included here. Rather, it is the harmony that perpetually unfolds, climbing here, descending here, and climbing again, finally to reach moments of ecstasy. The melody itself, like many of Fauré’s, is largely in stepwise motion, which lends to it both pliability and simplicity. These kinds of slow-moving melodies from Fauré – often too slow to sing, if you’re one who fancies singing along – are not always show-stoppers in their own right. Instead, we are mostly likely drawn into the deeply saturated, intoxicating chromaticism they allow for in the harmony.
A commentator like Charles Rosen found weakness in this, searching in vain for something sturdy as a basis for the kind of motific melodic development Beethoven exemplified. Yet if motific development is essentially a narrative tool, what makes Fauré so singular, or even iconoclastic, is that we don’t necessarily look to the melody to tell the story. It is certainly there, but it is not in the forefront, announcing its own primacy. This lends an inconspicuousness to his music – for me, a beautiful kind of mystery – that may be related to his less visible status in the pantheon of composers. All well and good, I say. Once you know about Fauré, there is no turning back. He quietly and steadily seduces you. The story he tells sticks on you; you cannot shake it. You have been initiated.
You might know of “dream catchers.” Made of cloth, they hang above our bed at night, and capture the ether of our dreams as it emenates outwards from our consciousness. They are used in some spiritual traditions, variously, for protection, or perhaps revelation. My favorite music from Fauré, like the slow third movement of the 2nd Piano Quartet Op. 45 included here, often has the quality of a dream – one of those ecstatic kinds of dreams in which something was revealed, the kind of dream like he evoked in his famous song, “Après un rêve.” His music can transmit that feeling right before it all slips away, just upon awakening. It is somewhere between the two. Fauré is a dream catcher.
Brad Mehldau, July 2021
