The virtuoso Marc-Andre Hamelin isn't the first pianist one would think of when it comes to Faure's music, but he has recorded all kinds of things, even ragtime, and as it happens, he does quite well with the dense miniatures heard on this album. Faure's Nocturnes are at some level connected to Chopin's but are quite different, with murky chromaticism, especially in the later ones, setting the night atmosphere. Faure is thought of as a musical conservative, but one would hardly know it from the pieces here that stubbornly refuse to settle on a tonal center. The counterpoint is complex, and a successful performance is one that untangles it. There isn't big, pianistic virtuosity here, but Hamelin's ability to balance Faure's registers is virtuosic in its own way. The Barcarolles, a genre not much pursued by other composers but for Faure seeming to allow rays of Venetian sunshine into his rather closed-in French world, are lighter but basically cut from the same cloth. Things lighten up with the final Dolly Suite, Op. 56, where Hamelin performs with his wife, Cathy Fuller. (For those wondering, neither Mi-a-ou nor the Kitty-valse has anything to do with cats.) Although Hyperion's church sound is not idiomatic, it does not damage the remarkable clarity in what is a significant entry in the Faure discography, one that landed on classical best-seller lists in the late summer of 2023. ~ James Manheim