Philippe Gaubert - Works for Violin, Cello & Piano (Various Artists)

Information

Composer: Philippe Gaubert

• (01) Sonate pour violon et piano en La majeur
• (05) Trois Pièces, pour violoncelle et piano
• (08) Quatre Esquisses, pour violon et piano
• (12) Lamento, pour violoncelle et piano
• (13) Trois Aquarelles, pour violon, violoncelle et piano

Jean-Marc Phillips-Varjabédian, violin

Henri Demarquette, cello

Marie-Josèphe Jude, piano

Date: 2013

Label: Timpani

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Review

The booklet-note by no means downplays the promise of this disc. ‘One will discover with stupefaction an authentic masterpiece,’ it says of Philippe Gaubert’s Violin Sonata, a work composed in 1915, published five years later but here apparently recorded for the first time.

Stupefaction might be putting it a little strongly but the sonata is certainly revelatory of a creative talent worthy of attention. Some of the Gaubert works in this programme – the Trois Aquarelles for piano trio together with the Trois Pièces and the Lamento for cello and piano – featured on a Fuga Libera release in 2010 from the Trio Wiek, and identified a composer with a nice line in nostalgia and with a fluency and refinement redolent of Fauré. On that disc the Trois Aquarelles were played in Gaubert’s arrangement for flute, cello and piano – Gaubert (1879-1941) was himself a flautist, a pupil of the influential Paul Taffanel – but Jean-Marc Phillips-Varjabédian, Henri Demarquette and Marie-Josèphe Jude here play the original version with violin instead of flute, capturing the music’s essential Gallic grace, its translucency and its romantic impulse, qualities that also imbue the Quatre Esquisses for violin and piano.

The sonata, however, is made of more muscular stuff. From the emphatic gestures at the start, it would seem that Gaubert knew his Brahms and was not unaware of Franck in terms of harmony, but the music develops a personality of its own. This fine performance offers no reasons why it should so long have endured neglect.

-- Geoffrey Norris, Gramophone

More reviews:
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2014/Jun14/Gaubert_chamber_1C1203.htm

https://www.amazon.com/Gaubert-Works-Violin-Cello-Piano/dp/B00J1D5V88

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Philippe Gaubert (5 July 1879 – 8 July 1941) was a French musician who was a distinguished flautist, a respected conductor, and a composer. He was one of the most prominent French musicians between the two World Wars. After a prominent career as a flautist with the Paris Opéra, in 1919 Gaubert became professor of flute in the Conservatoire de Paris, principal conductor of the Paris Opéra, as well as principal conductor of the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire. Gaubert's compositions are not especially innovative, but his work benefited from the examples of Franck, Ravel, and Debussy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Gaubert

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