Search - Cesar Franck, Ernest Chausson, Michael Levinas :: César Franck: Piano Quintet; Ernest Chausson: String Quartet

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M. C. Passarella | Lawrenceville, GA | 11/16/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The Franck quintet certainly is. Inspired by one of Franck's piano pupils, an apparently alluring young woman, the Piano Quintet is one of the most sultry works in chamber literature. From the passionate cry of its opening measure to the relentlessly driven last movement, a sort of "Chasseur Maudit" in which lust is the pursuing demon, the work was too much for its dedicatee, the sedate (at least in musical terms) Camille Saint-Saens. At the premiere of the work, in which Saint-Saens was soloist, he stormed off the stage, leaving the music behind on the piano.



Unlike Saint-Saens, Michael Levinas and the Ludwig Quartet clearly love this music and embrace its passionate nature with a special fire in their playing. And Levinas manages to get inside the difficult piano part to show that it is perhaps the most musical, as well as musically challenging, of all the celebrated 19th-century piano quintets.



The Chausson quartet, a work that was presumably incomplete on the composer's death, has an understandably unfinished quality, but that gives this very interesting piece an added mysteriousness. Not at all as firey as the Franck, it is a piece of proto-Impressionism in the style of Chausson's Concert: somewhat rambling, but filled with striking ideas and producing sauve sounds on the strings more anticipatory of Ravel than of Debussy.



The sound on this Naxos disc is not quite as polished as the performances, but it is certainly well above average. All around, a great bargain."

DISCOVERY AND REDISCOVERY

DAVID BRYSON | Glossop Derbyshire England | 01/24/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Is the Chausson quartet unfamiliar to you? It is possible to have been an enthusiastic amateur musician with a large collection of recordings and a domestic radio set permanently plumbed into the classical music channel for half a century, and yet never to have encountered the work, and you may take my word for that. It is a 3-movement piece with a slow introduction to the first movement and it was left unfinished, as it had to be, when the composer met his end in a bicycle accident at the age of only 44. D'Indy finished the finale off, presumably using sketches and drafts left by Chausson, and I can't tell you (because the liner has not told me) whether there is any serious element of his own composition in what he did.



You will be unlikely to find a better introduction to it than on this disc, would be my own guess. The work is not likely to supplant the quartets of Franck Faure Debussy and Ravel in popularity, but now knowing it I for one would go out of my way to hear it performed. It has real character and nobility to it, and the Quatuor Ludwig rise to its eloquence superbly, particularly in the central slow movement. Apparently Chausson was in the course of revising this movement when he met his untimely end, but I hope that this, like the topping and tailing by D'Indy, is not made a pretext for leaving the quartet unplayed. If Bach had lived ten years longer I dare say he would have gone on tinkering with Book II of the 48. We can be quite satisfied with what we've got.



What I don't advise is playing the whole disc at a single session. Fine as Chausson's quartet is, it is sharing the space with Cesar Franck's greatest composition in a performance that I would call superlative. The commentary in the liner is really a bit disappointing here. I get bored and turned off by commentaries purporting to be about Beethoven that are really about the French Revolution, the affliction of deafness, the triumph of the human spirit and the siege of Vienna, and my attention retires in a big way from supposed essays on Shostakovich that are about WWII, Stalin and Zhdanov. However Tristan and Isolde itself does not evoke erotic longing via music more than Franck's quintet does (for me at least) over long stretches. I don't know Franck's biography very well, I don't know the story in any particularity of his Dante-and-Beatrice relationship with his young pupil Augusta Holmes, but I would really have thought that the liner might have at least dipped its toe in the issue.



For decades now I have lived with a superb account of the Franck quintet from the Heifetz/Piatigorsky concerts, with Leonard Pennario doing the piano. I was struck immediately by the difference of tone in this performance. The opening is not so imperious, and, very strikingly, the piano's quiet response to the declamation of the strings is downright demure. The erotic note is struck right away. From there on the general concept of the work could be described as not dissimilar as regards tempi etc, but the Heifetz set is more suggestive of the severity and grandeur for which some praised it at its first appearance, and which indeed are among its most imposing characteristics. This set (perhaps assisted by the recording, of which more in a moment) does not downplay such aspects but catches the tone of physical desire in a way that I shall find unforgettable, I don't doubt.



I am an outright devotee of Brahms, and his own great piano quintet, in the same key as Franck's, is widely thought of as one of his major masterpieces. Whether it is or not, for me it's not the equal of Franck's. Brahms did things far beyond Franck's scope, but in my opinion nobody ever did a piano quintet (a type of composition that seems to have brought out the very best in many composers) that equals this one. As I have already said, I have lived with and loved one performance only over all these years. I love it still, and there are obviously other accounts that would reward your and my further enquiry. In particular there is an issue by Richter and the Borodins which is unlikely, to say the least, to be bad. However there is something utterly special, to my own ears and mind, about this performance. It may be that the recording helps the impression, I must say in fairness. The tone is a bit soft-focus, particularly the tone of the piano and particularly right at the start. This does not impede clarity, and it does not inhibit power, above all at the mighty orgasmic climax of the first movement. It is not, in truth, the best technical recording job for the year 1996, but if that bothers you I suggest some revision of your ideas might not be out of order. Try, for instance, the central theme of the slow movement, like a beam of sunlight on to Franck at the organ of his church conferring sanctifying grace, and ask yourself whether you can still be exercised about the minutiae of recorded quality.



The liner makes the standard allusion to `cyclic form', which means recalling themes from the earlier movements in the finale. In case anyone is the least bit interested, let me offer my view that there is no such form as cyclic form. The form of any finale is, say, sonata form or rondo or variations or passacaglia or whatever, and that remains the case even if the movement consists entirely of quotations and reminiscences. Franck liked the cyclic process, and he does it here with complete assurance and conviction, which is more than I would say for his great and lovely symphony, fond though I am of that.



Naxos again, great price. Aren't they marvellous?"