Gabriel Fauré put his own often edgy stamp on the formerly dreamy genre of the piano Nocturne with 13 works that span the last 40-plus years of his career. Brad Mehldau’s album opens with the last of the series, completed three years before Fauré’s death in 1924, its meandering melodic lines and restless harmonies emerging here as if created in the moment—a work of today, daring, unsettling, somehow familiar yet new at the same time.
This and three other Nocturnes, the wistful fourth, the emotionally turbulent seventh and the mercurial 12th, serve as the frame for Mehldau’s reflections on Fauré, five exquisite miniatures steeped in rich sonorities and echoes of the long-lived French composer’s engrossing harmonic language.