Naxos continues its
championing of Hummel with a disc that
regrettably also serves as an in
memoriam to that fine British violinist
Micaela Comberti, one of whose final
recordings this must have been. She
died at the early age of fifty-one.
We’ve come to admire
Hummel’s concertante works recently
and recordings of his choral music have
opened up hitherto under-explored areas,
greatly to our advantage. In fact it
might be argued that we are now moving
away from Hummel the virtuoso keyboard
exponent, so beloved by pianists of
the Golden Age, to a reflective transitional
period in which his large-scale choral
works are increasingly taking their
place on the fringes of the canon. And
not before time.
Which is not to overlook
the reams of chamber music that he wrote
throughout his life, and which is the
raison d’être of this new
release. Hummel was a gloriously fluent
composer but that very articulacy could
sometimes lead to a preponderance of
note-spinning, repetition and a surfeit
of what one might call concertante bluffness.
That’s certainly the case here but only
from time to time.
The Piano Quartet
was published posthumously in 1839
and is cast in two movements. There
is some languorous phraseology in the
opening Andante cantabile, even
if the fortepiano does sound rather
recessed in this recording spectrum
but there’s a concerto-sized Allegro
to contrast with it. The string
players provide the cushion – and the
tuttis – for the sturdily striding piano
part – all very attractive if not especially
distinctive. The much earlier G major
Piano Trio is a suavely laid out
three-movement work that reveals Hummel’s
consummate professionalism. The over-long
opening movement is followed by a Minuet,
with plenty of gusto in this performance
as Susan Alexander-Max detonates some
left-hand fortepiano fillips amidst
a certain amount of trenchancy. The
Rondo finale is light-hearted
with a sparkling piano part - naturally,
as Hummel was a leading virtuoso on
the instrument - a sliver of a fugato,
and a certain Beethovenian feel to some
of the piano writing.
In 1826 Hummel completed
a Cello Sonata, a big work, romantic,
spacious and immediately attractive.
The piano part has a touching nobility
of expression, but also a welcome incision,
one that here tends very occasionally
to over-balance the more reticent cello
in passagework. Again the material can
be over-stretched but it hardly lacks
for melodic interest, not least in the
lied of the Romance, which possesses
a suave beauty - the word ‘suave’ tends
to rise unbidden when thinking of Hummel
- but also a contrasting declamatory
section. Easy-going, and full of strongly
accented figures, Banda and Alexander-Max
do well by the folk-like pages of the
finale in particular, and they complete
a successful traversal with a degree
of panache.
The F major Trio
is the earliest work here, dating
from 1807, and reveals the powerful
influence of Haydn. From the gemütlich
opening, the unrolling fugal passages
- which soon give up the ghost - and
the variational second movement, this
is very much in the Viennese tradition,
solidly classical and topped by a fashionable
- or maybe just past it - Turkish
Rondo finale.
The sonorities evoked
by the well-versed ensemble of baroque
instrument practitioners are most attractive
and add a certain tangy frisson. Sometimes
the recording in Weston Parish Church
loses a degree of focus and string instruments
can be over-balanced by the fortepiano
but this doesn’t happen too often. Spirited
and lyrical, though not invariably convincing,
this is another feather in the Naxos
Hummel cap.
Jonathan Woolf
Simon Standage, violin; Pal Banda, cello; Susan
Alexander-Max, fortepiano 
