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!

Brahms’s Trio op.114, originally conceived for clarinet (like the two Sonatas op.120), is presented here in its version with viola: ‘Like all Brahms’s works, this trio is a vocal, melodic piece. And the viola is perhaps the instrument of the string quartet that comes closest to the human voice’, says violist Miguel Da Silva. ‘This version with viola obliges me, as a cellist, to listen differently: our two stringed instruments must “breathe” together and match their articulation’, continues Xavier Phillips. These three works from late in Brahms’s career testify to his modernity: ‘Brahms was often considered a classical composer who was impervious to modernity, the guardian of a certain tradition’, says pianist François-Frédéric Guy, who agrees with Schoenberg that he was, on the contrary, highly innovative: ‘We have a fine example, in the trio, of the extraordinary modernity of his combinations of rhythm and timbre: he is a total innovator.'