Piano Quartet No. 1 in C minor, Op. 15

The opening is a bold, unison string melody over an off-beat piano rhythm, a combination that sounds more propulsive than anything you might expect from a French Romantic composer. Fauré wrote this four-movement work between 1876 and 1879, partly during a broken engagement, and the Adagio slow movement is the one place where that personal upheaval surfaces, with what one scholar has described as 'frustrated harmonic progressions and ascending melodic fragments' holding the music in a sustained state of unresolved tension. He later scrapped the original finale entirely and replaced it in 1883 with a faster, rhythmically restless movement that ends in a bright C major coda.

What to listen for

In the second movement Scherzo, the time signature alternates between 6/8 and 2/4, which makes the metre feel as though it periodically loses its footing. Then in the trio section, the strings play muted and the piano switches to rippling broken figures, so the texture briefly becomes lighter and more veiled before the original pulse snaps back. In the finale, watch for the moment where the forward motion cuts off abruptly before the coda, then resumes at a higher dynamic level to drive toward the final cadence in C major.

Recommended rendition

Trio Wanderer with violist Antoine Tamestit (Harmonia Mundi, 2010) has been frequently described by reviewers at The Strad as offering 'beautifully idiomatic renditions' of Fauré's piano quartets, and is often cited alongside the Domus recording (Hyperion, 1985) as a first recommendation for this work.

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