Max BRUCH (1838-1920)
String Quartet No. 1 in C minor, Op.9 [28:03]
Swedish Dances, Op.63 [24:03]
Piano Quintet in G minor [25:32]
Goldner String Quartet
Piers Lane (piano)
rec. Potton Hall, Dunwich, Suffolk on 18-20 February 2015
HYPERION CDA68120 [77:40]
Bruch is much better known for his orchestral works, such as
the ever-popular violin concertos, and so it is a pleasure to hear him in
a more intimate guise with this selection of chamber works from various points
in his career. They are generally slighter works than the concertos and symphonies,
but the Goldner String Quartet offer sympathetic readings.
The Piano Quintet is a late-ish work (completed 1888) but without opus number.
The piano is often reduced to an accompanimental role but Piers Lane executes
that admirably. The instrument is immersed within the rich-toned string sound
of the Goldners, providing a warm backdrop with rippling accompaniment in
the Scherzo’s Trio, or delicately placed chords elsewhere, never threatening
to unsettle the music’s balance. Meanwhile the strings themselves play
with Mendelssohnian control, only to allow greater emotion to break with a
fuller, passionate vibrato at moments of heightened emotion such as in the
second movement, or the Scherzo’s Trio. Altogether they make a fine
case for music which otherwise would not register as greatly memorable.
Even so, this remains the highlight of the disc. Composed when the composer
was all of twenty, it is unfair, perhaps, to expect too much of the String
Quartet No.1. For all its confidence, there is little that is striking about
the material Bruch employs, or at least his treatment of it – often
there is the sense of pregnant material left unexploited. Again the spirit
of Mendelssohn looms large, although in tonal structure the composition appears
to bear something in common, surprisingly, with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony
– it shares the same key overall with a transition to the triumphant
major in the finale, the slow movements of both are in A flat, and a section
of that movement in the Bruch sounds like an echo of one of the variations
in Beethoven’s model with slow notes over a long-winding filigree line
in the middle strings and pizzicato cello underneath. The Goldners maintain
an essential poise and grace throughout the work, refraining even from descending
into wild fury in the joyous abandon of the finale which is reminiscent of
the frenetic dash of the equivalent movements of Schubert’s Death
and the Maiden Quartet and String Quintet. The ensemble also observes
effective contrasts in the music, for example as between the brittle, febrile
mood of the Scherzo and the warmer, more lyrical Trio, which is briefly recapitulated
in Beethovenian fashion just before the final flourish of that movement. Their
performance overall bears close comparison with Quartetto
Academica’s recording, as opposed to the rawer and less sustained
account
by the Diogenes Quartet.
With the Swedish Dances for violin and piano, Bruch hoped for a success corresponding
to that with which the Hungarian and Slavonic Dances of Brahms and Dvorak
had met, and he provided various arrangements to advance this. But Bruch’s
set has not held its own against those others in any form, surely on account
of his less catchy and distinctive material. The sequence tends to alternate
more extrovert, robust dances with calmer, slower examples, and Dene Olding
and Piers Lane capture those contrasts sensitively without exaggerating the
extremes of mood and texture.
Fans of Romantic chamber music will enjoy this disc, whatever reservations
one may have about the music itself, and it also sheds an interesting light
on Bruch himself.
Curtis Rogers
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