Intimate Treasures of Yesterday and Today

Good news for chamber music buffs. Sony Classical continues its revival of the incomparable Budapest String Quartet’s pre-stereo output, while RCA offers contemporary treasure with the first recorded appearance of Alicia de Larrocha as chamber music performer, a role she might have been born to fill.

The Budapest is heard in the six quartets of Beethoven’s Opus 18 (Sony “Masterworks Portrait,” two CDs, mid-price) recorded in 1951-52 at the Library of Congress.

One finds here an encapsulation of those qualities that made the Budapest both the most respected and most beloved quartet in modern history, attracting to a relatively esoteric medium an unprecedented number of listeners between the mid-1930s and the group’s disbanding in 1967.

These recordings capture the ensemble with three-fourths of its familiar personnel: first violinist Joseph Roisman, with his sweet, slender, penetrating tone marked by a persistent, fast vibrato achieved without excessive bow-pressure (and a tendency to play sharp) and the most sparing employment of portamento; cellist Mischa Schneider, the elegant master of the dancing bass, the quartet’s unflappable anchor, and Boris Kroyt, the velvet violist.

The second violinist in these sessions was Jac Gorodetzsky, an interim player and a quietly professional “blender,” between the two stints of the flashier Alexander Schneider. All five Russian-born artists (successors to the original Hungarian ensemble founded in 1917) are deceased.

These are interpretations without obvious historical context. The Budapest played everything their way, with an airy naturalness of expression: urbanely, skillfully, energetically--qualities present in every measure of this superbly remastered set.

While the comparisons shouldn’t be taken too far, some of what made prime-Budapest so appealing is recalled in the playing by today’s Tokyo Quartet of the Schumann Piano Quintet, a joint venture with Alicia de Larrocha (RCA Victor 61279).

And Larrocha’s playing is stunningly complete, utterly at one with the music and with her colleagues’ approach to it. The pianist’s exquisite dynamic shading, her projection of the smooth, unforced, subtly varied tone of a great Lieder singer who is also capable of the emphatic outburst, are matched--without literal imitation of phrasing--by the Tokyo every gorgeous step of the way.

The coupling, Schumann’s Piano Concerto, is far less compelling, a consequence of Colin Davis’ enervated conducting, which, unfortunately, seems to have an uncharacteristically complaisant Larrocha in its grip. So what? The Larrocha-Tokyo collaboration is so deeply satisfying that it becomes required listening, to these ears setting a new interpretive standard for Schumann’s evergreen Quintet.

Schumann’s other major composition for piano and strings, the Opus 47 Quartet, which, like the Quintet, is in E-flat, finds Andre Previn as chamber music performer, reuniting him with the string trio with whom he played the work a couple of seasons back at the La Jolla Festival: violinist Young Uck Kim, violist Heiichiro Ohyama and cellist Gary Hoffman (RCA 61384).

Previn as pianist-leader here exhibits a wealth of the dynamism that was in such short supply during his unhappy stint as conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. His attention fully engaged, Previn makes the most of Schumann’s lively rhythms and big tunes. The interpretation as a whole is, however, compromised by Kim’s vibrato-laden, squeezed-from-a-tube tone.

The coupling is a putative premiere recording of Schumann’s other Piano Quartet (in C minor), a youthful exercise, full of high-flown passions and a crying need for formal guidance.

Previn and associates wisely opt for a short-form version, shorn of most repeats, while a competing edition (Koch 1627, mid-price)--not announced as a premiere, but stemming from a 1979 radio broadcast--by an accomplished, no-name ensemble from Cologne, provides too much of a trivial thing by insisting on the big first-movement repeat.

The Koch program includes additional Schumann juvenilia, a hard-breathing set of “Etudes in the Form of Variations” on the allegretto of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, stolidly delivered by Paul Badura-Skoda, and the later, lovely Andante and Variations in B-flat for piano, four hands, affectionately, graciously performed by Anthony and Joseph Paratore.