Search - Gabriel Faure, Cesar Franck, Dante Quartet :: Faure/Franck: String Quartets

Beautiful, Fine, and Excellent from any Perspective...

Sébastien Melmoth | Hôtel d'Alsace, PARIS | 09/27/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

".

Hyperion and Dante Quartet: Well done!

This is a notably excellent issue from every perspective: repertoire; realization; recording; duration; notes; cover-art, etc. ...



Beginning with the cover-art: Pissarro's Neo-Impressionistic Sunset at Eragny (1890), nicely reproduced on the interior of the clear plastic jewel-box.



The very British Dante Quartet's reading here is nothing less than absolutely superb.

Its timings of these pieces are not disparate from other readings (+/- "

Fine Faure--and a Great Franck Quartet

M. C. Passarella | Lawrenceville, GA | 01/14/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"It's probably an embarras de richesse of the first order, but this disc represents my third recording of the Franck String Quartet. Obviously, it's a favorite of mine, but three? Well, somehow intuitively, I supposed the Dante Quartet's version would be special, and it does manage to pull well ahead of the Julliard's, which now seems rather creaky to me, and the Kocian Quartet's, which runs the Dante a respectable but still distant second. Like the Kocian Quartet (on Praga, if you can find it), the Dante offers a comparative rarity. While the Kocian plays the Lalo Quartet, a work from the beginning of that composer's career, the Dante offers the Faure Quartet, a product of the last year of the composer's long life.



The Franck is a vast work, with an especially lengthy first movement. As the fine notes to the Dante disc tell us, this is because of Franck's unusual design, which embraces elements of both song form and sonata form. The A section of the "song"--a melody of great plaintiveness and longing--envelopes the sonata section, which is passionate and tumultuous in the manner of Franck's Piano Quintet of a few years earlier. Only in the playful scherzo second movement does Franck allow himself to smile a bit before the almost tragic slow movement restores a darker mood. As in Beethoven's Ninth, the finale reprises the important themes of the previous movements, but in reverse order. And like Beethoven, Franck is able to dismiss the earlier restlessness and longing in a movement of joyful vigor, with a dashing final uprush in D major that recalls the life-affirming close of Franck's D Minor Symphony.



It's a powerful musical canvas, and the only reason it isn't heard more often, I'm sure, is the great difficulties in terms of stamina that it poses for any quartet. Luckily, in recording, this is not so much a problem, and the Dante in any event give a performance of great energy, and songfulness, from beginning to end.



The Faure, too, receives a wonderfully sympathetic reading, though the Quartet is a somewhat strange discfellow for the Franck. Intimate and aphoristic where the Franck is big in gesture and sprawling in design, the Faure is harder yet to bring off. While even the Dante can't convince me that it's a great piece of music, they make the very best case for it I can imagine.



Add one of Hyperion's most forceful yet atmospheric sound recordings, and you have a triumphant bit of music making.

"