Franck reviews

Pianist Nelson Goerner’s opening statement in Fauré’s First Sonata is passionate, free and probing, and I was expecting violinist Tedi Papavrami to follow suit, but he is a little more discreet and gentle in tone. This is emphasised by the recording, which favours the piano in dynamic and in its position in the sound image.

In this classic survey of Franck’s organ music, Isoir’s playing has all the brilliance and bite expected from a Cavaillé-Coll instrument. One of the dozen canonic pieces (Pastoral) is omitted. 

John Allison

There’s poise and elegance to Piers Lane’s introductory bars in the Franck, matched by the limpid piano sound from Potton Hall. Tasmin Little’s entry follows suit, although this isn’t a performance which wears its heart on its sleeve straight away: real passion is saved for the turbulent Allegro, where Lane’s delivery of the first appearance of the melody is slightly under-projected, but Little tears into it with abandon, and makes lovely contrasts of tone in the quieter passages.

Over nine months during 2016, the Hill/Harrison & Harrison organ of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge underwent restoration – each of the 4,300 pipes cleaned inside and out, new soundboards and action installed and the four-manual console overhauled, incorporating its old key coverings. And to ensure a long life free from dust and grime, the chapel was also deep-cleaned.

The music of César Franck seems to have gone unaccountably out of fashion, and what a pity that is. How marvellous, then, to encounter his blistering, no-holds-barred Piano Quintet, one of the masterpieces of its genre, scrubbing up bright in the hands of some of the best advocates it could hope for. The Takács Quartet matches the music’s mystic fervour and impassioned rhetoric with burnished intensity of tone, through which Marc-André Hamelin’s apparently effortless virtuosity dashes and dives with scintillating clarity.

Franck and Brahms, on the surface, make surprising bedfellows. In their lifetimes, Brahms’s native Prussia and Franck’s adopted home of France became mortal enemies with the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. Yet Franck’s Prélude, Choral et Fugue (premiered in 1885) and Brahms’s five-movement Sonata in F minor (written in 1853, when he was 20) have more in common than one might expect.

Franck • Chausson
Franck: Violin Sonata; Chausson: Concert for violin, piano and string quartet; Poème de l’amour et de la mer –Interlude
Rachel Kolly d’Alba (violin), Christian Chamorel (piano); Spektral Quartet Chicago
Aparté AP102  
68:51 mins

Organ buffs will salivate, and rightly so, but the appeal here is broader. This exquisitely produced collection of documentaries and performances comes from the same label as the Genius of Cavaillé-Coll set that won award for best documentary in the 2014 BBC Music Magazine Awards. The newcomer is similarly engaging in opening up the world of César Franck’s organ music.

 But no relation to César, Eduard Franck combines the neo-classical enchantment of his teacher Mendelssohn and Schumann’s lyrical fantasy to tantalising effect. (JH)