Trois chefs-d’oeuvre, dont deux quasi inconnus, interprétés de surcroît par deux interprètes épatants, la fine et véhémente Valérie Aimard et le toujours poétique Cédric Tiberghien : …un disque réellement indispensable.

The music of Gabriel Fauré is at once unclassifiable and inexpressibly beautiful. One must yield to its seductions, savour in it the charm of the unexpected. The cello is the voice of the Fauré mélodie without the words. Its mellowness conceals passion. When Xavier Phillips and Cédric Tiberghien take possession of it, it becomes sensual, incandescent, a bouquet of refined, evergreen harmonies. The Élégie and the Berceuse will never fade, nor will the two late cello sonatas, whose surging vitality is that of a young man of more than seventy!

François-Xavier Roth, not this time with his ‘period’ ensemble Les Siècles but with the Orchestre Philharmonique Royal de Liège, conducts a performance of César Franck’s Le chasseur maudit that has dramatic thrust, demonic intensity and clearly defined textural detail as well. There is a very real sense, in listening to this performance, that Roth and his orchestra have the dark narrative in their very blood, so that its frenzy, its tensions and the cursed hunter’s wild chase towards death come vividly before the mind’s eye.