Quatuor Ysaÿe & Pascal Rogé

We could hardly omit the Quatuor Ysaÿe and pianist Pascal Rogé from our series based on the chamber music of Fauré and his French contemporaries. The specific, refined style of this music is their natural habitat. The Quatuor Ysaÿe was formed in 1984 at the Paris Conservatory, where, a hundred years before, figures such as Franck and Fauré had tried to dominate the young Debussy and Ravel. Together with Saint-Saëns, Franck and Fauré were the only composers in late nineteenth-century France to concentrate intensively on chamber music. While Saint-Saëns and Franck were absorbed by the genius of Schumann, Wagner and Liszt, Fauré chose another path. Gradually he developed his own, unique language, permeated very much by the tonality of church music and the polyphony that underpinned his training as a church musician at the Niedermeyer School. The Second Piano Quartet marks the beginning of Fauré's mature period, when he found his own voice.