Brad Mehldau - Apres Faure

May 2024

On Après Fauré, Mehldau performs four nocturnes, from a thirty-seven-year span of Gabriel Fauré’s career, as well as a reduction of an excerpt from the Adagio movement of his Piano Quartet in G Minor. Here Mehldau’s four compositions that Fauré inspired are presented in a group, bookended by two sections featuring the French composer’s works.

Discussing the Après Fauré album in his note, Mehldau says: “If the sublime foreshadows our mortality, this music might communicate the austerity of death—Fauré’s as it approached him, but also the apprehension of our own. We find a kinship with the composer finally, in the form of a question that he tossed off into the future, to us. I have composed four pieces to accompany Fauré’s music here, to share the way I have engaged with Fauré’s question, with you, the listener.”

“This format is similar to my After Bach project,” he continues. “The connections are less overt, but Fauré’s harmonic imprint is on all four. There is also a textural influence, in terms of how he presented his musical material pianistically—he exploited the instrument’s sonority masterfully, as an expressive means. So, for example, in my first ‘Prelude,’ melody is welded to a continuous arpeggiation, both part of it and hovering above it; in my ‘Nocturne,’ it is possible to hear the harkening chordal approach in the opening of Fauré’s No. 12.”