Works for cello and piano

"Fauré favourites frame delightful accounts of the often-ignored cello sonatas. I'm increasingly becoming a real fan of the label Zig Zag Territoires. So many of their recordings seem to contain a world of riches, and this Fauré collection is no exception. Which is appropriate given that it marks Zig Zag's 10th anniversary. Gagnepain and Dayez conjure gorgeous sounds on their period instruments. A deeply rewarding listen."
(Editor's Choice Gramophone Magazine Awards Issue 2007)

"Lovers of the music of Gabriel Fauré are a little like bikers who wave at one another when they meet on the road. A friendly, informal club of people who have let the Faurean tide penetrate their souls and rock them through the vicissitudes of life . . .

But how to convey to someone who is not gripped by this 'song of the soul' the love of an art so imperiously inward? How to explain that the renouncement of instrumental colour is intended solely to sustain the harmonic colour, that the renouncement of thematic dialectics and of all formal rhetoric serves the flow of the curve, the endless melody? That the poetic values of Fauré's music (tenderness, elation, flow, horizon, curve, intoxication, night, hope, ineffability) make it worth renouncing more concrete, more palpable attachments. That the different values of sentiment and of its internal expansion are worth just as much as the rhetorical constructs dear to analysts and to Beethovenians. That the curved time with its uninterrupted ascents offered by the music of Gabriel Fauré is the guarantor of pure, essential music. That the Faurean phrase, long, conjoint and seamless, is unprecedented in classical melodic style." Jean-François Zygel

Notable for his wide-ranging curiosity, Xavier Gagnepain pursues his passion for music in a multitude of directions. Soloist, pupil of Maurice Gendron, prizewinner at international competitions (Munich and São Paulo), he is also a committed chamber musician as a member of the Rosamonde Quartet. His cello class at the Conservatoire National de Région (CNR) in Boulogne-Billancourt has a high reputation. In addition, he now devotes a growing portion of his time to conducting. An indefatigable champion of rare, unhackneyed repertoire, he does not hesitate to take part regularly in first performances of contemporary works. His book Du musicien en général . . . au violoncelle en particulier, commissioned by the Cité de la Musique in Paris, has enjoyed great success.

Jean-Michel Dayez, trained at the Chapelle Musicale Reine Élisabeth in Brussels (piano) and the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris (classes in accompaniment, harmony and counterpoint), has been a passionate exponent of chamber music since boyhood. After receiving encouragement from the Fondation Émile Bernheim of Brussels and winning a prize at the Antwerp International Competition, he now divides his time between teaching at the CNR in Lille and his performing career as a chamber musician.