Maria Kliegel and Nina Tichman capture Fauré’s playful spirit as well as his elegance and controlled emotion, in performances that would be hard to better.

Maria Kliegel, with pianist Nina Tichman gives rather incoherent performances of Fauré’s Cello Sonatas

A Fauré set beautifully delivered by this top-flight cellist

…played with good balances and a blend of drama and poetry by the redoubtable Kliegel and Tichman. These two players work together well and have a fine attitude towards this music. The Elegy is slow and intense and works beautifully that way. The sonatas are played dramatically, with a lot of contrast and attention to the subtle harmonic changes.

Gorgeous, simply gorgeous. The music of Gabriel Faure is such a rarified combination of classical refinement and lyric rhapsody that musicians usually realize they’re well-advised to avoid it completely unless they’re perfectly attuned to it (You don’t just play Faure casually, in other words, just to discharge some perceived duty to French repertoire.) Here is a young cellist who studied with Janos Starker and was mentored in Washington, D. C. by Rostropovich. She and young pianist Nina Tichmann are brilliant here in the cello-piano music of Faure which may be some of the greatest music in the entire classical cello repertoire. You may have a lot of trouble getting this disc out of your CD player. It’s that kind of musical performance.

But while her rich tone, strong technique, and nuanced interpretations are also manifest in this disc coupling Fauré’s two cello sonatas along with seven of the composer’s shorter works for cello and piano, her performances here cannot quite match her Beethoven and Brahms, much less her Schnittke. Kliegel’s intonation is as accurate and her technique as flawless as ever…the elusive but powerful emotions of Fauré’s slow movements are too straightforward in Kliegel’s interpretations…well played and well recorded…