Quatuor Ébène - Debussy, Fauré, Ravel: String Quartets (2008)

Paris-based Quatuor Ebène has released three classics of the French repertoire, the quartets of Debussy, Ravel, and Fauré. Although the works are frequently grouped together on recordings, they inhabit vastly different aesthetic worlds and are more notable for their individuality than their similarity. The last written, the Fauré (1924), is the most conservative, and the first, the Debussy (1893), the most revolutionary. The quartet performs the Debussy with a refreshing muscularity, the kind of dynamism the composer wrote into the score, but that some quartets tend to downplay, perhaps in an effort to make it comfortably conform to the popular image of the composer as an Impressionist. In fact, it has moments of real spikiness and angularity, particularly in the first two movements, that Quatuor Ebène plays with appropriate fierceness. At the same time, the reading is exceptionally fluid rhythmically, and its mercurial shifts emphasize the magic (and the strangeness) of a piece that offers an early glimpse into the imagination of one of music's most original thinkers. The performance of the Fauré is similarly sensitive to the composer's intent, and the group brings care and nuance to the more conventional melodic and contrapuntal writing. The Ravel quartet is formally similar to the Debussy, in whose honor it was written, but Debussy's wildness is replaced by a refined passion, which the ensemble conveys with fiery elegance; the fourth movement is practically electric in its energy. The sensitivity to the individuality of each quartet, and the interpretive strength of each of the Ebène's performances, makes this a release that should be of interest to any fans of the repertoire. Virgin's sound is clean and warm, with a good sense of presence.