Saint-Saens / Chausson: Piano Quartets

 
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CAMILLE SAINT-SAENS / ERNEST CHAUSSON
Saint-Saens / Chausson: Piano Quartets
Schubert Ensemble

[ Chandos / CD ]

Release Date: Friday 23 September 2016

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In this eagerly-awaited new recording on Chandos, the Schubert Ensemble returns with a programme that has been in its repertoire for many years: the piano quartets by Saint-Saëns and Chausson.

It would be hard to find a more vivid demonstration of the variety of French music making in the last quarter of the nineteenth century than these two quartets, and the differences between them are all the more striking in that neither of them conforms wholly to the casual cliché of French music as being light, graceful, charming, and anti anything that might be classed as intellectual.

From Saint-Saëns's witty and elegant Quartet in B flat major to Chausson's relatively unknown, rhapsodic, and full-blooded Quartet in A major, the thirty-year old Schubert Ensemble reveals two extremes of the French romantic repertoire and here offers a rare, attractive, and diverse programme.

"A satisfying and rewarding pairing in superb sound. The performances of both, as you would expect from an ensemble that has had these works in its repertoire for many years, as fine in their attention to detail as is their structural grasp and stylistic assurance" Gramophone

"Saint-Saëns' chamber music doesn't receive its due recognition, perhaps because it is less showy than his popular pieces. Here we have a work of real quality from his maturity, written the year after Danse macabre, the same year as his fourth piano concerto and two years before Samson et Dalila. The work is elegant, even a little restrained, with a cyclic structure: the themes from the opening gentle Allegretto, one of them as beautiful as he ever wrote, and the second movement Andante return in the grand Finale...Superb performances of two related, though contrasting works of great quality" (MusicWeb)

Tracks:

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921):
Piano Quartet in B flat major, Op. 41

Ernest Chausson (1855-1899):
Piano Quartet in A major, Op. 30