• Tracks

Faure: Complete Piano Quartets & Quintets / Composer: Gabriel Fauré / Performer: Jacqueline Eymar, Bernard Braunholz, Werner Neuhaus, Günter Kehr, Number of Discs: 2 / Length: 2 Hours 3 Mins. Recordings from the sixties (1966), sounding amazingly fresh and transparent. Reissue of one of the gems from the early VOX catalogue: Fauré 's complete piano quartets and quintets played by Jacqueline Eymar! Jacqueline Eymar (1922-2008), a pupil of Yves Nat, was one of the Grand Dames of the French piano school, together with Monique de la Bruchollerie and Yvonne Lefebure. Her style is elegant, perfectly natural, "inwardly" brilliant, playing the great French and German Romantics with exquisite taste and understanding. A superb set presenting the masterworks of Fauré's chamber music oeuvre, counting among his most frequently performed works. Fauré's Piano Quintets are both mature masterpieces and showcase how his musical language had evolved and become more experimental. Op.89 won great admiration from it's dedicatee Eugène Ysaÿe, who called it 'absolute music in the purest sense of the word'. Op.115, dedicated to another eminent composer, Paul Dukas, dates from 1921, three years before Fauré's death, and could be said to represent the pinnacle of his art. Indeed, following it's premiere in Paris, one reviewer wrote 'We had expected a beautiful work, but not one as beautiful as this.'