Piano Quartet

It is easy to understand why Chausson’s Concert is not as regular a feature of concert programmes as, say, Franck’s Violin Sonata. After all, a work for piano, violin and string quartet must surely have an instrumental imbalance. How can Chausson occupy all three violin parts for nearly forty minutes? In short, he does not. Nor does he try. Much of the Concert is essentially a sonata for violin and piano with an accompanying, though essential, string quartet. Chausson’s refusal to involve the quartet at every juncture merely to justify the players’ fees results in a signally well-balanced late Romantic work. When the quartet does feature on an equal footing, the effect is all the more telling. The fingerprints of Franck can be detected readily throughout the Concert, but in this and the Piano Quartet, Chausson’s individuality overcomes his teacher’s influence. Indeed, there are premonitions of Debussy, Ravel and even Shostakovich. Tangibly the product of live performances, these accounts traverse the gamut of emotions, bristling with energy, lyricism and conviction, and ensuring that this disc will never gather much dust.

With the proliferation of more and more recording labels and still more ensembles getting the opportunity to record their work, it is obviously increasingly difficult to bring anything truly original when performing works from the standard repertoire. Unfortunately, this fact may lead to some questionable performance decisions in striving for originality. Such seems to be the case with the Leopold String Trio and Marc-André Hamelin and their performance of the Brahms piano quartets.

The venerable pianist of the Beaux Arts Trio joins the Emerson Quartet for two memorable performances. To the uncommon clarity and rhythmic drive of the string players, Menahem Pressler adds some of his own expansive personality. The mix works beautifully. You can hear every note in the scores, and everything is played with great expression and enough rhythmic tension to keep the music flowing.

While it is always wonderful to have a recording of Schumann's early C minor Piano Quartet coupled with his mature E flat major Piano Quartet, the result of that coupling is usually only half a disc of listenable music. Because while the E flat major quartet is surely one of the masterpieces of the repertoire, the C minor quartet is, as its composer once sadly described it, "botched." The reason for this is straight-forward. The E flat quartet written when Schumann was 32 has the passion of youth joined with the technique of maturity, while the C minor quartet written when the composer was 19 has the passion of youth expressed without temperance – or indeed, competence.

The Bartholdy Quartet have an excellent pianist in Pier Narciso Masi, and his mercurial style is just right for these early works. The string players are always fluent and show a light-hearted vivacity in Mendelssohn’s scherzos (especially in the very winning Allegro molto of No. 3) and finales, and they play the simple slow movements gracefully. The Piano Sextet has an engaging immediacy. The recording was made in the fairly resonant Clara Wieck Auditorium in Heidelberg, which means that the microphones are fairly close to the strings and the balance is slightly contrived. Nevertheless the sound is good and the piano well caught.

Mendelssohn's three piano quartets were written in childhood. The second, the Piano Quartet in F minor, Opus 2, was written in 1823, a year after the first, and dedicated to his teacher Zelter. The strings start the first movement, before the piano adds its own more extended comment. It is the piano that introduces the A flat major second subject, based on the descending scale. The piano part gives an appearance of virtuosity, with complications of hand-crossing to impress an audience. The strings, violin, viola and then cello, lead back, as the central development comes to an end, to the recapitulation and final more rapid coda.

Dvorák's popular Piano Quartet No. 2 in E flat major, Op. 87, and Piano Quintet No. 2 in A major, Op. 81, have received numerous performances by Czech ensembles, as well as plenty of foreigners who have attained fluency in the received Czech style (or not). This fine release by Britain's Schubert Ensemble takes the step of defining a non-Czech way of playing Dvorák, with fresh and persuasive results.

Richter on the road in Tours France, with no studio in sight, and with a great Russian string quartet in a live performance. This enterprise in thoroughly inspired. Good tempi throughout and nothing drags. There is great interplay between Richter and the Borodins. They milk the lyrical content of the first movement and build the finale to its electrifying finale.