Pianist Germaine Thyssens-Valentin (1902-87) studied with Isador Philipp and Marguerite Long at the Paris Conservatoire while the school was still under Gabriel Fauré’s directorship. She put her career on hold for 25 years in order to raise a family and resumed public appearances in 1951. A few years later she reconnected with Fauré’s music, programming his complete solo works over five evenings. Hard-core collectors have long hoarded her extremely rare mono Ducretet-Thomson Fauré LPs from the late 1950s. Thanks to Testament, now we all are able to enjoy this unsung pianist’s extraordinary artistry.
Artur Rubinstein once described Brahms’ late piano pieces as “chamber music for piano”, and that precisely characterizes Thyssens-Valentin’s approach to Fauré. She maintains an intimate yet vibrant dialogue between her hands, allowing each Nocturne’s melodic, harmonic, and contrapuntal components to emerge in exactly the right proportion, hue, and character. Even in the elusive final five Nocturnes the pianist uncovers the normally veiled drama behind the music’s polyphonic logic. Listen, for example, to how the Tenth Nocturne’s top melody line and underpinning bass emerge in confrontational duet, or to the extra emphasis Thyssens-Valentin gives to the asymmetrical accents that reside among the Twelfth Nocturne’s swimming, middle-register clusters.
I’m particularly struck by the pianist’s spare use of the sustain pedal: in the Sixth Nocturne’s central section, for example, she achieves ravishingly shaded legato effects largely by fingerwork alone, and in the First Nocturne she takes trouble to distinguish the running 16th-note theme’s legato phrase against the subsequent staccato notes at the end of the measure. What’s important is how all these details sound so natural and inevitable in Thyssens-Valentin’s hands, as if you couldn’t interpret these pieces any other way. There are other ways to play Fauré, of course, but Thyssens-Valentin creates a sound world that transports you beyond the notes into the composer’s fragile soul.
