Niels Wilhelm GADE (1817-1890)
Complete Piano Trios:
Trio Op.42 [20:08]
First Movement of a Piano Trio [12:37]
Novelettes Op.29 [17:23]
Discarded Finale to the Novelettes [4:47]
Scherzo for Piano Quartet [8:46]
Trio Parnassus; Thomas Selditz (viola)
rec. Ehemaliges Ackerhaus der Abtei Marienmünster, 13-15 November 2009 and
27 September 2010. DDD
MUSIKPRODUKTION DABRINGHAUS UND GRIMM MDG 303 1665-2 [64:04]
The word 'complete' has never seemed less appropriate in the title of a CD.
The programme may include every work that Niels Gade wrote for piano trio,
but the number of these projects that actually made it through to a complete
form is surprisingly low. There is the Op.42 Piano Trio, which holds together
well enough. Then there are the 'Novelettes' Op.29, a work that seems to aspire
to the coherency of a classical piano trio, and that the composer had a few
goes at reorganising to that effect, but without any real success. The rest
of the programme is made up of orphaned movements, either discards or remnants
of projects that never got any further.
Not that issues of overall structure should spoil our enjoyment of the individual
movements, which for the most part hold together very well. There is nothing
all that radical about the style of this music; for the most part we are talking
about elegant, although rarely memorable melodies, supported by idiomatic
but unadventurous accompanying figures. The internal structure of movements
tends to be articulated by minor changes of tempo and dynamic, so there are
few extreme contrasts, and the passion beneath this music, such as it is,
is always very much tempered.
Gade was from Denmark, and the accepted wisdom is that his early music is
in a Nordic vein, which he turned away from when he went to study in Leipzig,
a town then dominated by Mendelssohn. But these trios tell a different story.
The First Movement for a Piano Trio, which was written in 1839 pre-dates his
trip to Saxony, yet is the most Mendelssohn-influenced of the lot. It is perhaps
unfair to describe it as a second-rate knock-off of Mendelssohn's own piano
trios, and anyway, the Mendelssohn works are so great, that even a pale imitation
like this still has the potential to be great music.
The visit to Leipzig may have cured Gade of some of his adoration for Mendelssohn,
but that was soon to be replaced by a similar devotion to Schumann. The result,
for most of the other works on this disc, is a style that flits between the
two composers. The Op.42 Trio demonstrates how Schumann's influence had the
effect of making Gade's chamber music more sophisticated and more texturally
dense. The Novelettes also display this increased textural richness and a
little more adventurousness with the shape and proportions of the melodic
lines. The Scherzo for Piano Quartet is the earliest work on the disc, dating
from 1836, and is very much juvenilia, its textures the simplest of any of
the works (despite the added viola) and the thematic material the least developed.
The Trio Parnassus are an adventurous group when it comes to programming,
and this disc follows similar forays into the neglected trios of Korngold
and Reger. The performances are committed and lyrical. There are occasional
tuning problems between the violin and cello, but the balance is good and
the ensemble is excellent. The recorded sound is very rounded, adding to the
coherence of the audio image, but obscuring the finer details, especially
in relation to the piano. It seems as if the microphones have been placed
well back, and while the resulting sound is certainly warm, it lacks any real
sense of intimacy.
Perhaps the recording engineers are doing the composer a favour. The sound-world
of this music sits somewhere between the Classical and the Romantic, and it
often seems that the composer is unsure himself about how much Romantic abandon
he can risk in these otherwise quite formal structures. Trio Parnassus go
some way towards encouraging him into the 19th century proper with
their often expansive and always melodic readings. By presenting the music
in the same audio environment as they previously have Korngold and Reger,
MDG take that final step on the composer's behalf.
Gavin Dixon
This music sits somewhere between the Classical and the Romantic.