Customer Reviews

Poulenc: The Complete Chamber Music

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I bought this because Joshua Kosman (an SF Chronicle music critic) highly recommended it. As with every Hyperion CD I've bought it is wonderfully done in every detail, even down to the cover art. In his review Mr. Kosman cautioned that this is not profound music, just fun stuff, beautifully played by the Nash Ensemble, and enjoyable to listen to. He is, as usual, 100% correct.

This is certainly a very useful collection and a relatively safe bet for any Poulenc lover or anyone wishing to investigate his highly attractive chamber music. That said, I am not going to pretend that all the performances here are flawless or even that they can quite manage to hold their own against the very best alternatives. In fact, what this collection primarily has to work against is a recorded sound that is surprisingly woolly for being a Hyperion release (and this is more annoying in the works for a larger ensembles than in the solo sonatas).

Surveying the particular performances I was less happy with the sextet for piano and winds, which sounds breathless and hurried; it is not that the performance is impossibly fast; rather the balances between instruments are poorly judged and the lines are often lost, to the effect that the work sounds rather ramshackle - of course, Poulenc himself was to an extent a composer that excelled in the brief, witty gestures more than overall, longer lines, but other performances have managed to provide a convincing, unified argument in this work . On the other hand, the performance is certainly ebullient; the point is that slightly tighter reins would not have been a drawback. (Or perhaps some more preparation time?) The delightful, madcap trio for piano, oboe and bassoon, on the other hand, comes across pretty well; if even more rhythmic bite is ideally possible, I enjoyed this one quite a lot. Still, I have to admit that I find the wind playing even here a little variable. The famous - and masterly - oboe sonata is overall well done, although the oboe playing sometimes comes close to sounding, well, incessant (in lack of a better term); the piano playing is also a little flat and lacking in rhythmic sharpness, bite and ebullience.

The sonatas for flute and clarinet, respectively, fit the same description; overall, they are pretty well done, but a little earthbound (though the melancholic clarinet sonata in particular is generally very appealingly done, and the flute sonata has a lot of atmosphere even if the playing verges on the forceful). That the piano playing is partially to blame is shown by the fact that the pieces for winds alone (the curiously Stravinskian sonata for two clarinets, the jocular sonata for horn, trumpet and trombone, and the polytonal sonata for clarinet and bassoon) work better - in fact, they receive generally delightful performances, although the musical content of these somewhat early and experimental works is rather weaker than in the solo sonatas with piano. I have no complaints about the performances of the miniatures (the boring Sarabande for solo guitar, the short Villanelle for piccolo and piano, and the unconvincingly serial Elegie for horn and piano), but these are hardly great works.

On the other hand, the violin sonata and the cello sonata are excellent. Leo Philips provide a spirited, sympathetic performance of the former (a sparkling first movement, an appropriately wistful second movement, and a bitter, almost harrowing, finale), but it was the cello sonata that struck me as the hidden masterpiece here - it is a work that is sometimes met with a rather dismissive attitude, but here it comes across as one of the great works of the repertoire. If the piano playing is occasionally a little uninspired (but it is generally very convincing here, I hasten to add), that is certainly offset by Paul Watkins's marvelous, warm cello playing. To sum up, then, there are better performances of many of the works here available, but despite some caveats these performances are generally good, and sometimes excellent. I would recommend finding some alternatives for the sextet and perhaps the sonatas for flute, oboe and (to a lesser extent, perhaps) clarinet, but this is overall a satisfying collection, and it deserves a relatively firm recommendation.