Gramophone award-winner and recording of legendary status

Simply the best: An unrivalled version, a cornerstone of the catalogue. A real gem! © 2012 Gramophone Classical Music Guide

One of Gramophone Classical Music Guide’s top 100 recordings

Ideally balanced and recorded, Cristina Ortiz and the Fine Arts Quartet offer performances that are warmly affectionate, fluent and musicianly to the core. Surpassing Domus’s fine Hyperion disc, these are outstanding readings and Ortiz is memorably sensitive to Faure’s subtle and intricate piano-writing. © 2011 Gramophone Classical Music Guide

Red-blooded, passionate performances show these neglected works for the masterpieces they truly are.

Cristina Ortiz and the Fine Arts Quartet nail Fauré’s particular combination of classic form and Romantic passion with perfection. They’re more expansive in the outer movements of the First Quintet, allowing for more detail and subtlety while their Adagio is tighter, more focused than their rival’s version. Ortiz’s crisply articulated piano under the busy strings in the second movement is a particular joy here, as is the way the ensemble fully captures the grave beauty of the Andante third movement by taking a flowing, more liquid approach to tempo, rhythm and melody that reflects their awareness of the style we hear in old recordings of French chamber groups of the 1920s and ’30s…Naxos’ Brazilian pianist and American string quartet are more idiomatically Gallic. The result is a disc to treasure.