Gabriel Fauré: Complete Songs, Cyrille Dubois, tenor

Cyrille Dubois and Tristan Raës’s complete recording of Gabriel Fauré’s songs won the Song award at the 2023 Gramophone Classical Music Awards, presented that October in London. It’s a genuinely complete undertaking — around 103 songs spread across three discs, covering the full 50-year span of Fauré’s writing for voice and piano, rather than a themed or best-of selection. Fauré wrote songs across his entire career, from the melodically direct settings of his twenties through to the harmonically far stranger, more inward late cycles written after he began losing his hearing — a range few single recordings attempt to cover in full.

About the programme

Rather than laying the three discs out chronologically, Dubois and Raës built each one as its own mixed recital, pulling early, middle and late songs together across all three rather than tracing Fauré’s musical development disc by disc. It’s a real interpretive choice: a chronological survey would let a listener hear Fauré’s harmonic language change and darken across five decades in one continuous arc, while this mixed approach instead treats each disc as a satisfying evening’s programme in its own right, closer to how a singer might actually construct a real recital than to a purely academic complete-works document.

About the performers

Dubois and Raës have performed together as Duo Contraste since 2010, giving this recording the kind of interpretive familiarity that comes from over a decade of working exclusively as a pair rather than pairing a touring soloist with a rotating cast of accompanists. Dubois, born in 1984 and raised in Normandy, trained as a chorister at the Maîtrise de Caen before studying at the Paris Conservatoire and making his La Scala debut in 2012; his voice type — haute-contre, a high, light French tenor register with a long specific history in French vocal music — suits Fauré’s own writing, which sits comfortably in that higher range rather than demanding the heavier weight of German or Italian Romantic song repertoire. The duo have also recorded the songs of Nadia and Lili Boulanger together, giving them a track record specifically in French mélodie before taking on a project of this scale.

Why a complete Fauré song cycle matters

Fauré occupies an odd position in the song repertoire: hugely important to French mélodie as a genre, but less consistently recorded complete than composers like Schubert or Schumann get for their own song output. A genuinely complete set, rather than a “greatest hits” recital disc, lets a listener trace exactly how Fauré’s own musical language shifted — the early songs are comparatively straightforward and lyrical, while the late cycles, written as his hearing deteriorated, move into a sparer, more harmonically ambiguous style that can sound startlingly modern next to his earlier work. Hearing all of it from one consistent duo, rather than assembled from multiple different recordings by different performers, makes that evolution far easier to follow as a single musical story.

A note on this page

This review was written fresh by the mmmusic team to cover a real, current recording — it isn’t part of the archive recovered from the original 1991–2018 shop. It’s new coverage extending the same critical tradition to what’s being recorded and awarded today.