Fauré & Franck - String Quartets

Dante Quartet

Hyperion CDA67664

Not having heard it for several decades I looked forward to renewing memories of the grand, lengthy César Franck string quartet, but these are no longer leisurely times and I found it too repetitive for my current taste*.

It is given a duly serious and intense performance, and I should not want readers to be put off; there is a lot of unknown Franck music to be rediscovered, which may bring surprises, especially works from his early years.

Franck's first movement runs to 16 minutes; Fauré's to only 6. His late idiom has an inwardness which I value and am not troubled by what can seem an uneventful surface. The Andante "lends its sober, meditative tone to the whole quartet" says Roger Nichols. But it repays close attention, with thematic fragments "generating different harmonies on their reappearances", rarely quite as expected. The faster finale serves also as a not very bucolic scherzo. I've played it throught twice...

Recommended.

Peter Grahame Woolf

* see Dante Quartet live at Blackheath; Franck's, Fauré's and Rubbra's string quartets.
I had completely forgotten having in 2003 urged the Dante Quartet to record exactly this coupling !
As good an example as you'll ever encounter of the joys of the web's hyperlink potential...

q.v also William Norris in Musical Criticism