Schubert Piano Quintet The Trout Melos

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.

With this recital Shai Wosner declares himself a Schubertian of unfaltering authority and character. Entirely modern in style (tonally lean and sharply focused, never given to easy or sentimental options), he relishes every twist and turn in the so-called Reliquie Sonata, with its quasi-orchestral, defiantly unpianistic first movement and its astonishing second movement modulations (Alkan himself never wrote anything more boldly experimental). Unlike Richter in his monolithic recording, Wosner opts for the two completed movements rather than allowing the music to evaporate into thin air, displaying throughout a finely concentrated sense of music that achieves its vision and depth through extreme austerity.

Mitsuko Uchida's slowly evolving Schubert cycle continues to thrill and scintillate with every new volume. At first glance, the works here might seem less essential than some of her previous offerings: an early (and infrequently played) sonata and the endlessly recorded Moments musicaux. However, just a few minutes' listening will soon persuade you otherwise. Schubert may have been only 20 when he penned this E-flat Sonata, but in Uchida's hands its expansive four-movement form is a perfect delight. She finds an ideally dancing lilt for the opening Allegro, not allowing the moments of drama to overshadow the movement's sunny disposition.

This set of recordings, as testified to by Mr. Cesar above, are simply breathtaking, individually, and as a complete traversal of Schubert's finest work for solo instrument. His painstaking preparation and studious forethought shine through clearly, illuminating and bringing to us deeply introspective yet fleet traversals of this amazingly sad, yet wistful, ponderously illuminated and wonderously elated and shot-through, delicately, with wispy tenderness, are simply positive testament to the caliber of this great artist.

Englund is primarily regarded as a symphonic composer. His seven symphonies and his concertos are the backbone of a substantial output. The majority of his chamber works were composed fairly late, after he returned to composition following a ten-year period of silence. The exception, however, is the Piano Quartet composed in 1941 and slightly revised in the early 1970s.

Schubert’s two Piano Trios are amongst his greatest works, contrasted both within themselves and between each other although written within weeks of each other. The B flat has a superficially contented character at the start, but even here clouds seem to come across the sky at increasingly frequent intervals. The E flat is a more obviously dramatic work throughout, and the curiously ambiguous march of the slow movement is surely some of the most inspired music Schubert ever wrote.

The RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet, with the support of Garth Knox (viola) and Piers Lane (piano), continue their excellent survey of Stanford’s neglected chamber works with this recording of his String Quintet No 1 and Piano Quintet. Growing up in his native Dublin in the 1850s and ’60s, Stanford was no stranger to high-quality chamber music, even if visits to Ireland’s capital by pre-eminent executants of the genre were sporadic.

Western listeners may well assume that the composers represented on this Polish release are of the sort who are well-known in their native country but neglected elsewhere; in fact, one learns that they are obscure even in Poland itself, which makes this a major rediscovery on the part of the Fryderyk Chopin Institute in Warsaw. Both these works were written in the 1830s, by which time Chopin had had time to become a major celebrity, but neither attempts to replicate his achievement (he didn't write much chamber music anyway).