Fauré • Franck • Poulenc • Saint-Saëns
Saint-Saëns: Cello Concerto No. 1; Fauré: Romance Op 69; Papillon; Franck: Violin Sonata FWV 8 in A (trans. for cello and piano by Jules Delsart); Poulenc: Cello Sonata
Bruno Philippe (cello); Tanguy de Williencourt (piano); HR Sinfonieorchester/Christoph Eschenbach
Harmonia Mundi HMM 902316 81:46 mins
There is much to enjoy here, but sadly less happy moments as well. Bruno Philippe possesses a lovely tone in lyrical items such as Fauré’s Romance and Après un rêve, and technically is well up to all the challenges. His best interpretation is of the Poulenc Cello Sonata, in which he and pianist Tanguy de Williencourt manage the surrealist elements, moving from lyrical suavity to demotic perkiness and back. He can’t be blamed for some scratchiness in Fauré’s Papillon since no cellist I’ve ever heard has avoided it in this piece – one of Fauré’s less enjoyable offerings, which his publisher vainly tried to rescue by calling it first ‘Dragonflies’, then ‘Butterflies’, much to the composer’s fury. But he and his colleagues are undeniably responsible for various doubtful readings in the Franck Violin Sonata and in the Saint-Saëns First Concerto. A habit has taken hold in the former, and adopted here, of playing the piano’s four introductory bars of major ninths not only more slowly than what follows, but with rubato. This is surely a nonsense. They are there firstly to establish the tempo, and secondly, with rhythm accepted, to rouse our harmonic interest in what this discord might lead to. At the very end of the sonata, the marking poco animato becomes hysterical, destroying the movement’s majesty. Finally, in the first movement of the concerto the second theme should be taken at the current tempo, not more slowly, while the first violins’ high triplets elsewhere are drowned by woodwind. Roger Nichols