Artur Pizarro, Petersen Quartett - César Franck: Piano Quintet, String Quartet (2008)

Both works on this new Phoenix Edition recording are from César Franck’s late period of composition. The Piano Quintet in F minor, owes its formal arrangement to Beethoven’s Quartetto serioso in F minor op. 95 and with its expressive, dramatic and symphonic structure heralded a new dimension of French chamber music. The massively symphonic and majestic sound with the highly virtuoso piano part pushes the work to the frontier between chamber and orchestral music.

The String Quartet completed in 1890 bears witness to his increased preoccupation with Beethoven’s late works. Vincent d’Indy described it as a “sonate cyclique”, the composer’s own accented restoration of sonata form, a balancing act between simplicity and complexity of the formal structure.

The Petersen Quartet, praised for many years for its courageously expressive tonal aesthetics and interpretations, is supported in this recording by an equally virtuosic Artur Pizarro, who knows how to elicit everything “monumentally symphonic” from the demanding piano part.

Artur Pizarro is a critically acclaimed pianist who has a broad range of repertoire across a variety of well known labels including Hyperion, Naxos, Harmonia Mundi and Collins Classics. He now extends his repertoire to the piano music of Faure and appears for the first time on Phoenix Edition.