Cortot’s and Thibaud’s 1927 disc of Faure’s First Violin Sonata remains a recorded classic, a performance of a lightness, vivacity and expressive sweetness beyond definition. The pianist’s identity may declare itself in his second-bar stumble but Cortot’s cantabile and elan are no less recognizable (truly Allegro molto in the first movement). Listen to both artists’ dialogue, their matchless give and take in the first-movement development and you will easily forgive their tendency to drift sublimely apart in the heat of the chase. Their virtuosity in the Allegro vivo’s skittering game of tag, or catch-as-catch-can, is of the most transcending verve and brilliance and so, too, is Thibaud’s fantastic quaver leggierissimo flight just before the finale’s exultant close. Listen to both artists in the Andante’s starry interchange commencing at 2'45'', one of many examples where they somehow reinvent the term “rubato”, tugging at every magical phrase and their listener’s heart-strings.
In the First Piano Quartet, with its more weighty, even Germanic opening, you may miss something of Cortot’s daring, his flashes of summer lightning, and yet Casadesus and his colleagues give a performance as elegant and lithe as any in the catalogue. Casadesus was both a supreme keyboard aristocrat and a formidable virtuoso, and his breathless pace in the finale’s radiant pages is effortlessly maintained, without even a hint of Cortot’s skirmishes.
Finally, Faure’s single String Quartet, played with special enthusiasm and devotion. The Krettly’s swooning portamentos (also characteristic of Thibaud, though his artistry eclipses all Palm Court associations) may blur Faure’s spare and luminous polyphony, but the players fully convey a valediction of the strangest gravity and enigma. Anguished in a ‘contained’ and elliptical way peculiar to Faure, the Quartet suggests an acceptance of that final journey into the great unknown, the very reverse of Dylan Thomas’s famous riposte, “Do not go gentle into that good night”.
Ward Marston’s transfers (particularly of the Sonata) are a magnificent achievement, allowing all these performances to take wing in a style virtually unknown today. After all, they came from a time when live and studio performances were one and the same, when players who shelter behind modern technology did not exist.'