United States Fauré: Joshua Bell, Irène Duval (violin), Steven Isserlis (cello), Jeremy Denk (piano), Blythe Teh Engstroem (viola). 92nd Street Y, New York, 9.7.2025. (ES-S)
Fauré – Violin Sonata No.1 in A major, Op.13; Piano Trio in D minor, Op.120; Sicilienne, Op.78; Berceuse, Op.16; Piano Quintet No.1 in D minor, Op.89
A year after New York institutions somehow overlooked the Fauré centennial, the 92nd Street Y made quiet amends by scheduling two July evenings devoted to his chamber music. Thanks to the foresight of its curators, three of Fauré’s most devoted advocates and eloquent champions – Joshua Bell, Steven Isserlis and Jeremy Denk – joined by two like-minded colleagues, violinist Irène Duval and violist Blythe Teh Engstroem, ensured that their passionate mission to shed more light on these extraordinary scores did not bypass New York.
Fauré’s chamber music occupies a singular place in the French repertoire – elegant in form, yet quietly subversive in harmony and construction. His idiom resists easy categorization: grounded in formal elegance, it ventures into harmonically ambiguous, rhythmically supple territory. Interpreting it ‘requires wholeheartedly romantic emotion, but with classical discipline’, as Steven Isserlis – the driving force behind this effort to make Fauré’s chamber music more widely known – has observed.
While Debussy and Ravel dazzled with color and surface allure, Fauré worked from within, his radicalism cloaked in restraint, his expressivity all the more affecting for its refusal to announce itself. The emotional arc of a movement may seem understated on the surface yet unfolds with profound inevitability – often with a quasi-Sisyphean character, built from phrases that seem to begin again and again, circling upward through subtle shifts rather than too easily reaching a climax.
The richness of Fauré’s chamber legacy was abundantly evident in the first of the two programs – a thoughtfully constructed evening that blended the seemingly simple with the intricately wrought and early works with late ones, all presented in a non-chronological order. This approach allowed the inner continuities of Fauré’s language to emerge organically, revealing how the clarity and lyricism of the early Violin Sonata No.1 resonates with the compressed, searching introspection of the Piano Trio or the refined yet elusive expressivity of the First Piano Quintet.
Bell and Denk opened the program with the Violin Sonata No.1 in A major, bringing out its lyrical warmth and rhythmic vitality. Bell played with a singing tone and natural phrasing, letting the melodic line unfold effortlessly, while Denk provided a flexible, attentive piano part that shaped the music’s changing moods with a light touch. In the Andante, the two maintained clarity and restraint, allowing the gentle sway and subtle tension of the music to emerge without affectation. The Scherzo had a buoyant lift, with crisp articulation from Bell and playful detailing from Denk. In the Finale, they sustained momentum without rushing, letting the music’s charm and elegance speak on its own terms.
Written near the end of Fauré’s life, the Piano Trio in D minor belongs to the composer’s extraordinary late period – a time when, despite profound hearing loss and physical fatigue, he produced some of his most distilled and radical music. Like Beethoven, Fauré seemed to retreat into an interior world, shaping works that are minimal in gesture but charged with complexity. The trio speaks in a restrained, intimate voice, its melodies pared down to essentials, and subtle shifts in harmony and dynamics unfolding with quiet inevitability. A deep inner cohesion becomes more compelling the longer one listens. Bell, Isserlis and Denk approached the trio with admirable unanimity. Isserlis shaped the opening cello theme with warmth and gravity, answered in turn by Bell’s lighter, more inward tone. Denk was particularly attuned to the trio’s shifting textures, supporting the dialogue with phrasing that felt supple and unforced. In the Andantino, the ensemble achieved a sense of suspended time – soft dynamics, passages of near-unison between violin and cello and expressive restraint combined to haunting effect. The final movement, more animated but still poised, moved with quiet determination rather than brilliance, ending not with triumph but with a sense of calm resolution.
After intermission, Isserlis and Denk returned for two shorter works – the Sicilienne and the Berceuse – each a small gem illustrating Fauré’s gift for quiet songfulness. In the Sicilienne, Isserlis’s phrasing was unhurried and graceful, bringing out the dance’s gentle lilt without turning it into pastiche. Denk matched him with a light, translucent touch at the piano – supportive, never insistent – giving the music just enough lift to suggest motion without urgency. The earlier and even more fragile Berceuse was played with genuine tenderness, its lullaby contours unfolding in a single breath. Both performers resisted unnecessary embellishment, offering instead an example of vibrant and joyful musical intimacy.
The program closed with the Piano Quintet No.1; a work whose coherence and confidence belie its long and troubled gestation. If the outer movements recall the richness of the Romantic tradition, the inner workings of the piece suggest something more austere. Here, the influence of Fauré’s immersion in Renaissance polyphony during his student days comes to the fore. The quintet’s broad melodic arcs and uncluttered textures unfold with a kind of disciplined lyricism, focused on melodic interplay rather than stacked harmonies. Wednesday night’s rendition was a remarkable one in terms of both cohesion and the richness of its muted color palette. Denk’s playing was luminous and agile, never overwhelming the strings but providing the harmonic and rhythmic spine of the ensemble. Bell and Duval traded lines with elegance and restraint, while Engstroem and Isserlis grounded the ensemble with warmth but no excess weight.
Overall, it was an outstanding evening of chamber music – made truly special by the unmitigated joy shared by the five musicians with an audience that filled the hall, as they illuminated the intricacies of these elusive and endlessly rewarding compositions.
Edward Sava-Segal