By any standards, the Sydney-based Goldner Quartet is one of the finest string quartets around today. Much as one would like to hear them in the core quartet repertory (though they did release a Beethoven cycle on the Australian ABC Classics label a decade ago), it’s to their immense credit that most of their recent recordings have featured either contemporary works composed specially for them, or pieces that have been overlooked by the musical mainstream. Their discs for Hyperion have already included quartets and quintets by Borodin, Taneyev, Bruch, Bloch and Hamilton Harty, and their latest pairing of piano quintets by Frédéric d’Erlanger (1868-1943) and Thomas Dunhill (1877-1946), immaculately played with Piers Lane as the pianist, maintains that focus on the forgotten and the neglected.
Neither of these pieces, though, is especially memorable. D’Erlanger was born in Paris, into a German-American banking family, but spent most of his life in London, where he became an important benefactor of opera and orchestral concerts. He was always a keen composer, and because of his influence his works, including operas and ballets, were performed by many of the leading artists of the time. His Piano Quintet dates from 1902; it’s certainly a fluent exercise in late Romanticism, if rather formulaic, with a mix of mostly German and occasional French influences, a striking scherzo movement and a demanding piano part that d’Erlanger himself played.
The 1904 quintet by Dunhill is more obviously rooted in the home-grown tradition. He’d been a pupil of Charles Villiers Stanford at the Royal College of Music, where he was a contemporary of John Ireland. One critic later described his chamber music as “companionable, healthy, and as English as the South Downs on a sunny day”. That sums it up really; it’s all very pleasant but entirely unremarkable, and even performers as accomplished as Lane and the Goldners really can’t make it any more interesting.
This week’s other pick
Anyone keen on exploring the more neglected corners of 20th-century chamber music could do worse than starting with Max Reger. Outside Germany at least, his extensive output is still under-explored, more than 100 years after his death. Reger’s music has earned the reputation of being dourly chromatic, but a piece such as his Clarinet Quintet Op 146 belies that; clearly modelled on Brahms’s late example, it has a lightness of touch, a wit that isn’t usually associated with the composer. Thorsten Johanns’s performance with the Diogenes Quartet on CPO certainly brings that side of the score out, while the pairing with the String Sextet Op 118, provides an example of the better known, more tortuous Reger, with its densely woven textures that come very close to the world of the Second Viennese School.
