Midwinter Festival Fauré - Both stimulating and wearying

Music for Galway’s Midwinter Festival Fauré

Hardiman Hotel and St Nicholas’ Collegiate Church, Galway

★★★☆☆

The French composer Gabriel Fauré was born in Pamiers, south of Toulouse, in May 1845. That was the year when Wagner’s Tannhäuser premiered in Dresden and Wallace’s Maritana premiered in London, and when the five-year-old Tchaikovsky began having piano lessons in the Russian town of Votkinsk, a 1,300km, 18-hour drive east of Moscow. And the death of Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach in Berlin, at the age of 86, brought a great musical dynasty to an end.

Fauré would live to the age of 79, and witness first-hand some of the astonishing musical developments of the early 20th century. He even attended the premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, after which he sought out a copy of the score.

His most popular pieces, the Requiem with its seraphic Pie Jesu, the Élégie for cello and piano, the Pavane for orchestra with ad-lib chorus, and songs that grace vocal recitals tell only a small part of his story. Much of his own output is as far removed from those works as it is from the music of the bulk of his contemporaries. Aloof might be a better description. His music, especially in his later pieces, can be elliptical and elusive, the kind of work that is often seen as being for connoisseurs rather than the general public.

This year is the centenary of his death, and Music for Galway devoted its Midwinter Festival (at the Hardiman Hotel from Friday, January 19th, to Sunday, January 21st) to his work. This is possibly the largest dedicated focus that Fauré has had in Ireland.

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The artistic reins were in the hands of the French pianist Michel Dalberto, who, more than a decade ago, was one of the pianists involved in a recording of the composer’s chamber music for piano and strings, and also gave an all-Fauré programme at the National Concert Hall with the Capuçon brothers in 2013.

Dalberto, who provided insightful and sometimes provocative spoken introductions during the concerts, is an imposing player, with an impressively wide dynamic and tonal range. He plays Fauré like an enthusiast who delights in making sure that no detail will go unremarked, or underappreciated. He loves to draw attention to particular skeins of melody, sometimes not the most obvious or important ones, or interesting dissonances and harmonic shifts, and likes both to raise his voice and whisper in the pursuit of contrast.

The approach is both stimulating and wearying. In spite of his deep thoughtfulness, he is the same kind of risk as a film that’s full of special effects. When everything is being highlighted as special, it all tends to become a new normal.

Strangely, Dalberto turned out to be an agreeable chamber-music partner in just one of the ensemble groupings. The best known of Fauré’s chamber works is his early Piano Quartet in C minor, which he completed in his early 30s and revised in 1883. It’s a distinctively impassioned, sometimes almost orchestral-sounding piece, and the partnership with Nathan Mierdl (violin), Andreea Banciu (viola) and Laure-Hélène Michel (cello) brought some of the best ensemble playing of the weekend.

Sadly, the other chamber works, the Violin Sonata in A, Op 13, the Piano Quintet in D minor, Op 89 (given with Galway’s ConTempo Quartet), and the Cello Sonata in D minor, Op 109, were all musically lopsided, with Dalberto’s prominence and forceful projection precluding the creation of persuasive musical balances. To take just one example, the relationship between the two instruments in the cello sonata was the inverse of what was captured on disc in Dalberto’s recording with Gautier Capuçon.

Dalberto also offered the composer’s two largest but infrequently heard piano works, the Ballade, Op 19, and the Theme and Variations, Op 73. The moment-by-moment intensity showed little time for any sense of middle ground, and his handling of the late Nocturne in B minor, Op 119, sounded unnecessarily gnarly.

Each of the weekend’s three chamber concerts included a selection of Fauré’s songs, sung by the Swiss baritone Benoît Capt. I cannot say that I warmed to Capt’s limited vocal colour and expressive range. The singing came across as prosaic.

The weekend’s vocal highlight came in the Galway native Saoirse Knauer’s handling of the soprano solos in a Saturday-afternoon performance of Fauré’s Requiem at St Nicholas’ Collegiate Church under Mark Duley, with St Nicholas Singers, a “large all-comers choir” with singers of “every level of ability and experience”.

Knauer sang with directness and simplicity and a purity of tone that were deeply touching. The pianistic highlight of the weekend was Dalberto’s partnership with Finghin Collins in the Dolly Suite, one of the most delightful of piano duets, which they delivered with real relish.