LDV102

Vladimir Jankélévitch put it very well: ‘There is no Faurean aesthetic . . . For Fauré, composing means doing without saying.’ Cédric Tiberghien: Fauré is elusive. Any attempt to grasp him is doomed to failure. You manage to play him once you’ve stopped trying to do so. Xavier Phillips: Because he composes in accordance with academic forms, you think you can grasp him, get hold of him from that angle, but you won’t manage it. Because what emanates from his music doesn’t come from the form. It’s that passion, that ardour, everything that springs forth and is expressed within what could be a straitjacket, but isn’t one. The difficulty of this music is precisely to avoid making the listener aware of the formal framework. You have to be in the flow, in the excitement, and that’s something that escapes any notion of arithmetic or logic. 27 XAVIER PHILLIPS, CÉDRIC TIBERGHIEN