New Laborers of Love

Playing chamber music is the most satisfying way to make music, the well-heeled supervirtuosi who occasionally engage in it keep telling us.

But ask any musician who makes his living in that rarefied sphere and he will, without disagreeing with the stars’ evaluation, add that it’s a full-time pursuit and a very difficult and not particularly remunerative profession. You don’t play the big houses; you split your fees several ways; you are, out of financial necessity, almost constantly on the road, and the big record companies are hardly falling all over themselves to capture your interpretations for posterity.

There are exceptions, of course, the celebrity handful that includes the Juilliard, Guarneri and Berg quartets and the Beaux Arts Trio. But even they hardly command as entities what a single superstar pianist or violinist (to say nothing of a singer) bags for a much shorter evening’s work.

Yet they keep on coming, young people fresh from the conservatories of Europe and America, ready to enter this grueling field--largely, if not solely, for the satisfaction of making their kind of music for a fiercely dedicated, if relatively small, audience.

And they are finding new routes to recognition these days via small companies willing to risk the less than extravagant sums required to add their product to the ravenous CD market.

Consider Centaur Records, based in Baton Rouge, La., and GM Records (no relation to the automotive giant), which is quartered in the Boston suburb of Newton, Mass.

Both become instantly important with their simultaneous release--which is rather unfortunate for both from a business point of view--of one of the most imposing works in the repertory: Schubert’s monumental Quartet in G, D. 887. To more than a few musicians it is the 19th-Century work in the medium after Beethoven, the greater popularity of its Schubertian predecessor, “Death and the Maiden,” notwithstanding.

Both recordings feature virtual unknowns: the Manhattan Quartet (on Centaur 2023, CD only)--presumably from New York--and the Vienna-based Franz Schubert Quartet (GM 2018, CD only).

The performances come at the music from different directions, so to speak. The Manhattan plays it for its inherent dark drama, with a big, pulsating ensemble tone and grand climactic flourishes. The Viennese players, in their less weighty, less aggressive but hardly undramatic interpretation, are intent, above all, on projecting the lyric elements--and they do so with extraordinary refinement of tone.

Either way, the listener is blessed.

There are new competing editions as well of the familiar Brahms G-minor Piano Quartet. But here stars are pitted against unknowns.

Pianist Murray Perahia and members of the late, lamented Amadeus Quartet (CBS 42361, LP or CD) are sure to ring up larger sales figures than Finnish pianist Ralf Gothoni--better known, if known at all, as the accompanist of several Scandinavian singers--and the Munich String Trio on the obscure Ophelia label (67105, CD only) based in Boulogne, France.

On Ophelia, the listener can experience the excitement of discovering young talent and hear Brahms played with a degree of forthright, vigorous emotionalism missing from Perahia’s more self-consciously sensitive work, although the honest, rough-hewn playing of his colleagues compensates to a point.

More Brahms: His piano trios, all four (including a bland piece in A of questionable authenticity), are contained in a two-CD set (Philips 416 838) that may be the swan-song of the “old” Beaux Arts Trio, i.e., prior to the recent retirement of cellist Bernard Greenhouse.

That the Beaux Arts has decided to continue with a new cellist is good news indeed. That Greenhouse’s time to retire from the ensemble had come is apparent here in playing sufficiently frail-toned and disinterested to undermine the entire project.

Nor is there any justification beyond its performers’ glossy names to justify the rerelease (on RCA 6260, CD only) of the 1972 recordings of Brahms’ Trios in B, Opus 8, and C, Opus 87, by pianist Artur Rubinstein, violinist Henryk Szeryng and cellist Pierre Fournier, whose efforts never achieve anything resembling the ensemble ideal of thinking with a single mind. Still, Rubinstein and Szeryng are impressive in terms of tone and temperament, even when going their divergent ways. But Fournier’s thick-toned sawing is unbeguiling at best.

Much more lively and cohesive playing comes from the New York-based Arden Trio, previously unknown to this listener, which couples a rarity, Saint-Saens’ very pleasant Trio in E minor--which sounds curiously like a slenderized version of Tchaikovsky’s A-minor Trio--and the familiar, splendid Ravel Trio (Delos 3055, CD only). Both are played with an irresistible combination of fire and suavity by these excellent, presumably young, artists.