Celebrating a Non-Celebrity Quintet

The quintets Mozart and Beethoven wrote for piano and winds are frequently recorded, inevitably appearing as a coupling. The Quintet in E-flat, K. 452, was a favorite of Mozart’s among his own works (Beethoven’s Opus 16, in the same key, is delightful but rather too obviously a knockoff) and it has proven attractive as a recording vehicle for celebrity pianists, among them Murray Perahia, Radu Lupu, Alfred Brendel, Andre Previn and James Levine.

It is, however, not music frequently encountered in live circumstances since it is scored for winds rather than the usual string quartet.

The aforementioned big names notwithstanding, the piece’s manifold beauties are more consistently exhibited and its problems most successfully solved by a less starry pianist, Carol Rosenberger, within the context of stunningly accomplished work by present and former members of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra: oboist Allan Vogel, clarinetist David Shifrin, bassoonist Kenneth Munday and hornist Robin Graham (Delos 3024).

Mozart’s most problematic writing occurs at the very outset, where the piano’s bare chords, unsupported by sustained wind phrases, create wide-open spaces that cry out for ornamentation but receive it too cautiously or not at all from other interpreters.

Rosenberger, through the simple expedient of arpeggiating those opening chords, allows the music to coalesce and take off, and when ornamentation is suggested, here and elsewhere in the score, she takes appropriate, tasteful advantage.

But what Rosenberger offers isn’t merely convincing from a musicological or structural standpoint. Her playing--in both Mozart and Beethoven--sparkles with wit and intelligence, as does that of her colleagues.

While Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet is hardly a stranger to our concert halls, one would be hard put to recall a live performance (perhaps even one on recordings) with the degree of thoughtfulness, warmth and ensemble polish shown in a new recorded version by David Shifrin and fellow members of Chamber Music Northwest, the annual event that makes Portland a summer paradise for aficionados of the intimate muse.

The accompanying work (on Delos 3066) is the less frequently encountered Brahms String Quintet in G, Opus 111. It is lamentable, considering the parade of string quartets to which we are annually treated in Southern California, that not one is ever sufficiently enterprising to add the second viola which would allow us to hear the small, choice repertory for string quintet.

At any rate, the G-major Quartet is given a soaringly dramatic, songful reading here by the Chamber Music Northwest strings (all, in fact, New York-based): violinists Ani and Ida Kavafian, violists Walter Trampler and Steven Tenenbom, and cellist Fred Sherry, who with the exception of Tenenbom are also heard in the Clarinet Quintet.

Beethoven’s sole string quintet, in C, Opus 29, is neglected even on recordings, perhaps because “early Beethoven” is still regarded with insufficient seriousness by Romantically inclined interpreters and critics. Too bad, for Opus 29 is a beauty, dramatic and tuneful without the sweat and complexity of the late works.

Its compact disc debut (Nimbus 5207) is energetically, if roughly presented by Britain’s Medici Quartet and violist Simon Rowland Jones, but the coupling was ill-chosen: Beethoven’s First “Rasumovsky” Quartet as part of the Medici’s ongoing Beethoven quartet cycle. The competition here is overwhelming and the Medicis do not give the impression of being world class.

One of the masterpieces of the tiny repertory of vocal chamber music is Ravel’s “Chansons madecasses” for voice, flute, cello and piano and a midpriced re- release (Elektra/Nonesuch 71355) of the dozen-year-old recording featuring the late Jan DeGaetani serves as a fitting memorial to that treasurable artist. DeGaetani’s coolly precise, soft-grained vocal delivery is strikingly contrasted to the exotically sexy lyrics, “collected and translated” by an 18th-Century literary faker, the Vicomte de Parny, who in fact neither visited the land of their supposed origin, Madagascar, nor spoke its language.

The remainder of the exceptionally attractive Ravel program is devoted to the Sonata for Violin and Cello (Isidore Cohen and Timothy Eddy, respectively) and a pair of rare two-piano pieces, “Sites auriculaires” and “Frontispice”, enlisting the services of Gilbert Kalish, Teresa Sterne and the late Paul Jacobs.