Franck, C: Piano Quintet in F minor, Op. 14

These studio recordings are taken from the period 1941-1961 and feature Jascha Heifitz performing with the Music Art Quartet (Chausson Concerto for violin, piano and String Quartet), the RCA Symphony Orchestra conducted by Itzler Soloman (Chausson Poëme for violin and orchestra) and his own quartet performing Cesar Franck’s Quintet in F minor.

Beautifully-recorded album from master violinist Gidon Kremer and his Kremerata Baltica, spanning a wide range of music, from the spirited to the spiritual, all of it broached with conviction. Intensity and concentration, differently calibrated, are the watchwords here. At the centre is César Franck’s massive Piano Quintet, flanked by works of a ‘spiritual’ cast by Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer and Giya Kancheli, currently celebrating his 75th birthday.

Franck’s Piano Quintet in F minor is the work in which the Belgian-French composer is perhaps at his most impassioned and melodically inventive. BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist, Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili (b 1987), in her ECM debut, gives a bold and compelling performance.

Gidon Kremer and Giya Kancheli have a long association that’s resulted in several ECM recordings, including the superb ‘Lament’, and ‘Time...and Again’ and ‘V & V’ on the album In l'istesso tempo. Silent Prayer was composed on the occasion of the 80th birthday of Mstislav Rostropovich and the 60th birthday of Gidon Kremer in 2007 and is dedicated to these two great musicians, both among Kancheli's closest friends. After Rostropovich died shortly after his birthday, the composer entitled the just-finished work ‘Silent Prayer’.

Long a champion of original compositional voices, Kremer presents also music by Stevan Tickmayer, born in the former Yugoslavia in 1963, and currently resident in France. A musician of diverse background, Tickmayer has been studying with Kurtág since the mid-

90s. He began his Eight Hymns in December 1986, on learning of the death of his favourite filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovsky, and played the (unfinished) work in his solo concerts for several years. He revised it in 2003 after working with Kremerata, “the ideal messengers” for this musical mourning.

Gidon Kremer’s relationship with ECM dates back to the legendary album Tabula Rasa from 1984 that put Arvo Pärt on the map. It was followed by several volumes from his famous Lockenhaus festival – from where the performances on this new CD also emanate. Kremer’s second recording of the Sonatas and Partitas for unaccompanied violin by Bach, released in 2005 on ECM New Series, met with unanimous international acclaim.

Cristina Ortiz and the Fine Arts Quartet again join forces for this recording of Franck’s Piano Quintet.The extraordinary emotional range of this work is unified by the tight thematic relationships typical of the composer’s ‘cyclic’ structuring.

His String Quartet, composed ten years later, is a summit of Franck’s achievement, also cyclically conceived and revealing his admiration of Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Brahms.

“Schönberg, insisting on the legitimate interest that attaches to every aspect of the life and person of a great man, once said he would have liked to see how Mahler tied his tie. It is in something of that spirit that one approaches the earliest Mahler work to have come down to us, the single movement for piano quartet in A minor (apparently the first movement of a projected four-movement opus), which he wrote while a student at the Vienna Conservatory, probably late in 1876 when he was 16 years old. As Mahler put it in 1893 “in the end I sent it to Moscow for a competition and it got lost”. But in fact it was found among the effects of his widow Alma after her death in 1964, in a folder labelled “early compositions”…

"Weighty, four-square, thickly-scored, discursive, impassioned, Franck’s quintet seems to transgress against every one of what one usually thinks of as the conventional “Gallic” virtues: deftness, lightness of texture, epigrammaticism, objectivity, elegance, wit… Even such a quintessentially “Gallic” composer as Debussy could respond to Franck’s idealism and purity of aims, despite the gulf that separated their artistic temperaments. “César Franck is always a worshipper of music”, he wrote. “No power on earth can induce him to interrupt a passage he considers just and necessary; however long it is, it must be gone through. This is the hallmark of an imagination so selfless as to check its very sobs until it has first tested their genuineness.” What redeemed Franck for Debussy, then, was the intense, irresistible sincerity that has won his late work a devoted audience now for over a century. The quintet, the earliest of Franck’s works to have joined the enduring concert repertoire, bears it the most eloquent of testimonies.” Richard Taruskin / Columbia University 1981

This disc from the renowned Schubert Ensemble bring the spirit of the Paris “Belle Epoque” alive. Newly re-mastered recordings of Franck's Piano Quintet in F minor and his Sonata for violin & piano in A are performed with enthusiasm by the experienced Schuberts.

Franck was known as a man “enamoured of gentleness and consolation”, but these works tell a different story of an earthier man, less chaste, freed of starch and wing collar. Central to the quintet in particular was a woman; not Franck's dutiful wife, but a young student, Augusta Holmes “decorously rampant” and “possessed of bold beautiful features, abundant golden hair, and handsome breasts of which she was justifiably proud”. Rimsky-Korsakov admired her, but in Paris, Saint-Saens and Franck fought over her. Franck's wife would have known that the emotions so readily expressed in this Quintet were not for her, but for Augusta, Franck's “impure and seductive” organ student.

Both works on this new Phoenix Edition recording are from César Franck’s late period of composition. The Piano Quintet in F minor, owes its formal arrangement to Beethoven’s Quartetto serioso in F minor op. 95 and with its expressive, dramatic and symphonic structure heralded a new dimension of French chamber music. The massively symphonic and majestic sound with the highly virtuoso piano part pushes the work to the frontier between chamber and orchestral music.

The String Quartet completed in 1890 bears witness to his increased preoccupation with Beethoven’s late works. Vincent d’Indy described it as a “sonate cyclique”, the composer’s own accented restoration of sonata form, a balancing act between simplicity and complexity of the formal structure.

The Petersen Quartet, praised for many years for its courageously expressive tonal aesthetics and interpretations, is supported in this recording by an equally virtuosic Artur Pizarro, who knows how to elicit everything “monumentally symphonic” from the demanding piano part.

Artur Pizarro is a critically acclaimed pianist who has a broad range of repertoire across a variety of well known labels including Hyperion, Naxos, Harmonia Mundi and Collins Classics. He now extends his repertoire to the piano music of Faure and appears for the first time on Phoenix Edition.