Fauré Quartett - Overview | Deutsche Grammophon

“Chamber music is the only true form of music and the most authentic expression of a personality,” insisted Gabriel Fauré. Having taken its eponym’s guiding principle to heart, the Fauré Quartet is now widely regarded as one of the leading chamber groups in the world.

Within a short space of time it has conquered the great concert halls of London, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Brussels, Geneva, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Milan, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro and elsewhere. “They attract superlatives wherever they go,” wrote The Strad following a concert at London’s Wigmore Hall, while the Süddeutsche Zeitung praised them for a performance that “brought tremendous pleasure by highlighting interpretative details that had scarcely ever been heard before”.

Among the many international festivals at which the Fauré Quartet has appeared are the Rheingau, Schleswig-Holstein, Ludwigsburg, Schwetzingen, Montpellier, Sceaux and Kuhmo Festivals. The ensemble was formed in Karlsruhe in 1995 to mark the sesquicentenary of Fauré’s birth and was soon winning national and international awards, including the Deutscher Musikwettbewerb and London’s Parkhouse Award. Among their teachers are the Alban Berg Quartet and Misha Katz. The Karlsruhe Musikhochschule has appointed the group its quartet-in-residence, an appointment that had not been made in Karlsruhe for thirty years and that was a new departure for a piano quartet. The present recording of Mozart’s two piano quartets is the Fauré Quartet’s début release on the Deutsche Grammophon label.

11/2005