Reviews

The Tippett Quartet—violinists John Mills and Jeremy Isaac, violist Maxine Moore, and cellist Bozidar Vukotic—give fine, crisp performances of these works.

…These extremely satisfying performances compare favorably to those of the Lindsay Quartet in their two versions (Decca and ASV). For listeners who don’t know them, however, I’d warn that these quartets are more rigorously logical than emotionally moving, even in the lyric passages.

The Tippett Quartet completes its new survey with this second bargain CD, and it’s remarkably good. You should own this, if you like the music of the last century.

…the Tippett Quartet balances detail, tight rhythm, and emotional response without losing tonal focus or the long structural view. The central Allegro molto may give you the best idea of the character of the performances: accurate, tough, sensitive.

…The Tippetts don’t short-change us by playing safe, and while we need far more performances from other groups, on Naxos we do get a real sense of the transcendent. Try the Lento of the Third Quartet to hear high-lying passions that are not uncontained, but which feel true to life. Life enhancing, in fact. Just buy it.

The latest addition to Naxos’s extensive Bax discography teams Ashley Wass with the Tippett Quartet for a hugely impressive account of the large-scale Piano Quintet.

…A mightily imposing utterance it is, too, brimful of strong invention (the slow movement in particular can boast a tune in Bax’s most gorgeously Irish vein), and evincing a lofty ambition, tumbling fantasy and slumbering organic power that points the way forward to his great wartime trilogy of tone poems (The Garden of Fand, November Woods and Tintagel) as well as his cycle of seven symphonies.

…Wass and the Tippett Quartet prove magnificently assured and clear-headed proponents, sifting Bax’s often startlingly imaginative textures with breathtaking skill, while at the same time quarrying every ounce of bewitching poetry and spooky mystery from the slow movement.

…and no Baxian should miss hearing what Wass and company have to say about this ruggedly beautiful music.

It’s a piece [Bridge quintet]  that finally seems to be coming into its own (this is, by my reckoning, the fourth recording of it to appear within the last 18 months or so). Suffice it to say, Wass and the Tippett Quartet do Bridge proud, their reading having exemplary polish, ardor and thrust to commend it…

A peach of a disc, this, and a real steal at Naxos price.

The two piano quintets on this disc would seem to make such a logical pairing that I was sure the coupling had been done before, but to the extent that current listings are a reliable guide, apparently it hasn’t. Also surprising is the fact that no entries for Arnold Bax’s sprawling and occasionally luxurious, romantic quintet are to be found in the FanfareArchive going back to the beginning of it, which starts with the July/August 1991 issue. But the even bigger surprise is that this new recording is the only current listing of the work I’ve been able to find. A Chandos recording in my collection with the Mistry Quartet, which I’m sitting here looking at right now (CHAN 8795) seems to have gone MIA. In any case, it’s paired with Bax’s E-Minor String Quartet.

Frank Bridge’s quintet has fared rather better, both in the Archive and in the current listings. Peter J. Rabinowitz reviewed a relatively recent recording of the piece with the Goldner String Quartet and Piers Lane on Hyperion in 33:2; and even more recently, Michael Cameron in 33:5 reviewed a release on the Somm label by the eponymous Bridge Quartet.

Pianist Ashley Wass has been one of Bax’s strongest advocates; this is his ninth recording for Naxos surveying the composer’s works for piano solo as well as those that include piano in concertante and chamber compositions.

Bax completed his one and only piano quintet in 1915. I’d be less than honest if I said the piece is an easy listen. Its first movement, marked Passionate and Rebellious , sets up the conflicting impulses that seem to be at war with each other throughout the work. Outpourings of yearning lyrical beauty are suddenly savaged by highly agitated outbursts of anger. But it’s not just the juxtaposition of strong emotions that jars; that happens in almost all music from Beethoven on. More disturbing, to me at least, is the discordance between styles. One moment we find ourselves in the late 19th- or early 20th-century world of Delius, Bantock, Butterworth, and the English pastoralists, while the next moment we’re cast into a world so dissonant and rhythmically disjunct we could almost imagine this to be something written by Peter Maxwell Davies or Harrison Birtwistle. Perhaps I exaggerate slightly to make a point. Bax hasn’t wandered that far off course, but his quintet is a work of vehement contradictions. It’s also a work of great gravity, imposing weight, and epic proportions. At 41 minutes, a standard four-movement work in this form would be considered ample, but Bax’s quintet is in three movements. When all is said and done, the difficulties posed by this piece, both for the listener and I’m sure the players, might explain why it has enjoyed little currency on disc.

Bridge also wrote only one piano quintet, the D-Minor work on this disc, but it exists in two versions. In its original form of four movements, it was completed in 1905. Bridge participated in a private performance of the work in May 1907, and the piece received its first public hearing a month later. The composer was deeply dissatisfied with the quintet and withdrew it from circulation.

Five years later, in 1912, Bridge took not a scalpel but a meat cleaver to the score, preserving some of its thematic material but practically rewriting the whole first movement, reworking the finale’s development section, thinning out the piano part, and combining the two middle movements into one, thus making the quintet into a three-movement work. Bridge’s revisions recall and closely parallel what Brahms had done to his Piano Trio No. 1 in B Major 20 years earlier. The later version of Brahms’s trio retained the opus number of the original, while the two versions of Bridge’s quintet were assigned different numbers, but the fact remains that both versions of both composers’ works remain in viable performing editions, though as with the Brahms trio, the original version of Bridge’s quintet is rarely played.

Wass and the Tippett Quartet opt for the revised 1912 version, as do all others on disc as far as I know. A chorus of commentators and critics before me has noted the similarities between Bridge’s relatively early quintet and the music of Fauré. To quote from Cameron’s aforementioned review, “Bridge’s early infatuation with Fauré is evident in the lush Piano Quintet, a work bound with cyclic themes and brimming with passion (and occasionally sentimentalism).” If I chimed in with a similar opinion, I’d merely be singing in unison with the choir. So to add my own unobtrusive counterpoint to the chanting, I’ll say that Bridge’s scent is more English lavender than it is Coco Chanel. Melodies are not quite as voluptuous, the rhythmic profile is more pronounced, and harmonic modulations, more pungent, don’t morph and meld quite as smoothly as they do in Fauré. Nonetheless, Bridge’s quintet is a skillfully crafted, handsomely upholstered late or post Romantic score of appreciable beauty.

Unfortunately, I do not have either of the entries of the Bridge reviewed by Rabinowitz and Cameron; instead, I have a quite recent (December 2009) recording on the Dutton label with the London Bridge Ensemble, which contains a winning all-Bridge program. The playing and recording are first-rate, and this fine British Ensemble and label are, like Wass and company, working their way through a Bridge survey, though they’re not as far along in their enterprise as Naxos is. In any case, the Dutton CD is comparatively expensive—$18.99 at Amazon and $24.99 at ArkivMusic as of this writing. Performances and recordings being of equal merit, at Naxos’s budget price, I give the palm to the Tippett Quartet and Wass, who are excellent in every respect. The Bax is not likely to be love at first hearing, but the release is strongly recommended nonetheless.

Dutton Epoch's invaluable exploration of Richard Arnell's coruscatingly inventive music - including an outstanding symphony cycle from Martin Yates and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra - continues with the world premiere recordings of the composers five string quartetsfrom the Tippett Quartet, captured in stunningly natural sound and accompanied by exemplary booklet notes from Robert Matthew-Walker.

As Classic FM’s Composer in Residence, Howard Goodall certainly knows his market. For this third album composed for his hand-picked Enchanted Voices he has produced 13 exquisitely jewelled “Songs from the Psalms”, companion pieces, perhaps, for the Vicar of Dibley’s ubiquitous Psalm 23, bedecked here in its string quintet, organ and piano guise.

Although Bernard Herrmann was an American, born and bred, his family's roots were elsewhere. Coming from distinct Russian Jewish stock, his music often harked back to the vertiginous modernism of Europe. With scores such as Citizen Kane (his first) and the long collaboration with Hitchcock, he became synonymous with challenging the modes and methods of film music. But his non-film music has been overshadowed. Terrific, then, that Signum Classics has released a new recording of his chamber music, including Richard Birchall's String Quartet transcription of music from Psycho.

Herrmann's 1965 Echoes is an embittered and brooding work. The Tippett Quartet's muted playing beautifully captures the longing and emptiness of the music.

The Music. Thanks to Bernard Herrmann, screeching violins have become the international language of bathroom-based alarm. Psycho's famous frenzied score was written at the zenith of the uniquely fruitful working relationship between Herrmann and director Alfred Hitchcock. The gentler concert works Echoes (1965) and Souvenirs De Voyage (1967), were written during and after their eventual falling-out.

The Performance. Across all three works, the Tippett Quartet lucidly communicates Hermann's themes of mystery and paranoia .

It’s good to find some of Bernard Herrmann’s film music on disc. Perhaps his most famous score was for Hitchcock’s Psycho. It was scored for strings only and is here played in an arrangement by Robert Birchall for string quartet. If anything, it sounds creepier. Souvenirs de Voyage pays homage as a clarinet quintet to works by Vaughan Williams. Performances are splendid and the disc invites further exploration of Herrmann’s talent. Perhaps someone will now give us authentic recordings of these works in their original form.