Fauré / Enescu: Piano Quartets (Mélodies infinies)

Gabriel Fauré’s Piano Quartet in C minor was one of the first of its genre in France, composed as part of the ‘Ars Gallica’ idea of strengthening French music against German cultural domination. Fauré didn’t entirely escape the influence of Brahms however, and both he and his pupil George Enescu share a spiritual closeness to German late Romanticism in the melancholy complexity of expression in these chamber masterpieces. The monumental first movement of Enescu’s First Piano Quartet contrasts with the rhythmic momentum of the last, in a work that integrates French impressionism with the unmistakable folk music characteristics of his native Romania.