Fauré: Nocturnes & Barcarolles Aline Piboule

Album review

The year 2024, the centenary of Gabriel Fauré's death, has produced several excellent recordings of his music. Among the attractions of this one by pianist Aline Piboule is the piano on which it was made, a Gaveau instrument from just five years after Fauré's demise, and probably one that, for him, would have represented a kind of ideal sound. Piboule deploys it in the service of Fauré's nocturnes and barcarolles, two genres central to his piano music, with an opening Improvisation. It is probably the oversimplification of the year to say that these works follow a general pattern of limpid simplicity at the beginning that gets lost in increasingly complex harmonic and textural weeds as a piece proceeds. This is what happens, but the way this is executed differs profoundly in each of the 12 works here. At any rate, Piboule leans into the complexity, some of which is truly remarkable for a composer classed as "conservative." Sample the dizzying scalar counterpoint in the Barcarolle No. 10 in A minor, Op. 104, No. 2. Piboule's is not an especially sentimental Fauré, and she is convincing in her approach, which uses the colors available on her marvelous piano to the maximum. The sound from the Philharmonie de Paris is clear, and one suspects that Piboule is going to be gaining a host of admirers on this, her debut album on the Harmonia Mundi label.

© James Manheim /TiVo