The market is not exactly saturated with Fauré Nocturne cycles, in contrast to the seemingly endless Schumann Kreisleriana and Beethoven Appassionata recordings that cross my reviewer’s table. That’s one good reason to welcome David Jalbert’s second solo release for Endeavour Classics. He plays at an extremely high level, cultivates a warm, beautiful sonority, and is served well by Endeavour’s engineers. The instrument he uses boasts rich bass and middle registers, but the top octaves seem relatively unresonant and monochrome. Jalbert’s interpretations fall between Sally Pinkas’ ample-toned, forward moving performances on the obscure Musica Omnia label and the more intimately-scaled Jean-Phillipe Collard reference set on EMI.
In general, I find Jalbert’s pianism perfectly agreeable and sensitively sculpted yet sometimes a little bland. The reason for this is that Jalbert’s instinct for nuance is not harmonically oriented. He tends to glide over the felicitous modulations and polyphonic contours that provide crucial counterweights to the music’s surface charm. For example, his phrasing of No. 2’s opening section falls into predictable arcs, while he softens the following Allegro ma non troppo section’s accents that a pianist like Eric Heidsieck brings out to varied effect.
Next to the brooding anguish Vlado Perlemuter reveals in the great Seventh Nocturne, Jalbert’s faster, cooler dispatch sounds utterly uneventful, though pretty. However, in the three last selections, Jalbert’s dynamic range widens and his tone acquires an angular edge that suits the music’s bleak ambiguity. Perhaps this was to be expected, given Jalbert’s strong sympathy with tonally oriented contemporary music. In sum, collectors seeking a modern recording of the Fauré Nocturnes won’t go wrong with Jalbert, although the sonically inferior Heidsieck and historic mono Thyssens-Valentin sets remain artistically unsurpassed.
