Debussy, Faure, Ravel Piano Trios [Import]

Claude Debussy (Composer), Gabriel Faure (Composer), Maurice Ravel (Composer), Richard Lester (Performer), Susan Tomes (Performer), Anthony Marwood (Performer) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Performer: Richard Lester, Susan Tomes, Anthony Marwood
• Composer: Claude Debussy, Gabriel Faure, Maurice Ravel
• Audio CD (December 14, 1999)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Import
• Label: Hyperion
• ASIN: B000038I6C
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #266,060 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Customer Reviews

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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 5 STARS FOR CHRISTMAS, November 28, 2010

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DAVID BRYSON (Glossop Derbyshire England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Debussy, Faure, Ravel Piano Trios (Audio CD)

Honesty is the best policy, so let me say that as a matter of my own personal taste this disc is only a 4-star issue. However I also know that this is a highly subjective sentiment of mine, I am not aware that it is a sentiment felt by anyone else, and indeed the general feeling seems to be unqualified rapture. Under the circumstances I do not think it best to hold out defending my own viewpoint like Horatius at the bridge but rather to say that I can perfectly well understand why this recital is so highly regarded.

These three performances tick all the right boxes, and not just in the sense of getting everything right in matters of technique, taste and comprehension. There is real insight here as well, and the slow movement of the Faure trio is as outstandingly beautiful and as tenderly expressed as I had been led to believe. The outer movements also show a real sense for this composer's aristocratic and ultra-refined idiom, but I shall explain in a moment what it is about them that leaves me very slightly uncomfortable. Debussy's trio is a very early composition and I wonder how many experienced music-lovers would have known who its author was without being told. Myself, I might have guessed Elgar, in the certain knowledge that I must be wrong but having no better clue. In the circumstances it would be absurd to rate this performance in terms of Debussyan idiom as we would normally understand that, but I suppose it deserves full marks as a beautiful, lively and sympathetic rendering of the work such as it is.

The jewel of the recital, for me, is Ravel's celestial trio. Again, here it is done with taste, insight and the extreme delicacy that it deserves, the kind of delicacy with which one might handle a Ming vase. That is not to say that the performance lacks power where power is what is called for, because it does not. The sudden storm in the middle of the first movement, faintly reminiscent of Ondine from Gaspard de la Nuit, is dramatic and effective as it should be, and the final bars of the whole work, with their powerful trills, are thrilling with the trilling.

At all points the recorded sound is fine if not absolutely amazing, so just what small problem do I have with the set at all? It concerns the touch and tone-production of Susan Tomes. A good few years ago she was the pianist with the quartet ensemble Domus, the first thing I heard them in was Faure's piano quartets, and that too was met with universal critical acclaim. Except by me, it seems. Right at the start of the first quartet, and right at the start of the trio here, the piano has a slow tremolo figuration, and all these years later I find myself again thinking that Susan Tomes's tone is oddly diffident. This is a matter of her touch entirely - at least I hope it has nothing to do with the damper pedal, but I suppose it could have something to do with the type of recording the group favours or even with the particular instrument that Susan Tomes uses. What I do not want to suggest is any lack in her technique, which is self-assured and fearless.

I am quite prepared to write this feeling off as a personal idiosyncrasy of my own. It just surprises me that it has persisted so long, and when for comparison I played Ravel's first movement in my other cd version, from Ashkenazy, Perlman and Harrell, I found myself listening to what I think of as a normal pianistic touch. In all more `objective' respects I am happy to endorse the high praise that these performances have been given, and to reflect this in the star-rating.

The liner note, by Roger Nichols, is quite lengthy and informative. Fortunately it takes the works not in the sequence of presentation here (Faure/Debussy/Ravel) but in the order in which they were composed, which is Debussy/Ravel/Faure. All is well until Nichols's vocabulary starts to give him some problems with Faure. He might have got into less of a quagmire if he had stuck with the old concept of an `absolute' musician, a rather small class of composers significantly including Bach, Chopin, Brahms - and Faure. This is why Faure, like Chopin, did not give his compositions descriptive or evocative titles. Again with Faure, quoth Nichols, `the meaning is almost entirely in the movement between one note and another...' Fancy that now. In Mr Nichols's own text the meaning is entirely in the succession between one word and another, as in any statement about anything by anybody, and similarly any piece of music whatsoever is a matter of one note following another. In case this helps, he may be making the point that Faure's later works such as this one smooth out the traditional separation of distinct themes, and if that is what he means I would agree with him.

To me it is a duty to give this set a 5-star recommendation more than something I am driven to do by some ungovernable compulsion, but statistically, from such comment as I have seen and heard elsewhere, it is likely that you will not share my reservations.