LDV102

24 FAURÉ ∙ THE MUSIC FOR CELLO AND PIANO What are your personal bonds with Gabriel Fauré? Xavier Phillips: His music is really the music of my childhood. It was always there at home. My parents used to play it on piano four hands. The individual pieces have been my companions for many years. I’m thinking, for example, of the Élégie , which I used to play as a boy in the churches of Normandy, during the holidays. I came to the sonatas later, especially the Second, which is given in concert more often: its second movement is so reminiscent of the Élégie ! I was keen to find the thread that links these late works to the short pieces. Cédric Tiberghien: I don’t have any precise recollection of my first Mozart or Bach piece, but I do remember perfectly my ‘first Fauré’, which I played at the age of eleven: it was the Barcarolle no.4. It was like a reward! I went out and bought the score myself. It was the same with Beethoven. I lived through the isolation of the pandemic with his Diabelli Variations and Fauré’s Nocturnes; that tells you how much these two composers mean to me. But whereas Xavier has had these works for cello and piano at his fingertips for a long time, that was far from being the case with me. I played a few of the short pieces with my brother when I was a boy, but later on I had just done the First Sonata once. I learned the Second for this recording, and it called for a considerable investment.