Piatti Quartet: Resonance

The Strad Issue: August 2025

Description: Committed performances can’t disguise a musically uneven album

Musicians: Piatti Quartet, Emmanuel Despax (piano)

Works: Durosoir: Berceuse; Chant élégiaque; Prière à Marie. Farrenc: Piano Quintet op.40. Schumann: Piano Quartet

Catalogue number: SIGNUM SIGCD937

Louise Farrenc’s Op.40 Piano Quintet didn’t start out in this form but was arranged by the composer from a sextet for piano and wind quintet. You hear this in the way that the contrasting instruments – piano versus strings – begin with something approaching parity but devolve, by the time of the second subject, into piano sonata figuration with occasional string commentaries: wind players need more rest than their string counterparts.

The outer movements huff and puff in the early-Beethovenian C minor manner Farrenc imbibed from her teachers, Moscheles and Hummel, but only the sweet slow movement coalesces into something entirely personal.

Perhaps it’s cruel to compare this well-meaning quintet with Schumann’s miraculous Piano Quartet. Here is a composer who has absorbed the lessons of Beethoven (and Schubert, Haydn, Bach) and transfigured them into a work of surpassing contrapuntal ingenuity and motivic subtlety. Composed in 1842, it predates the Farrenc by a decade, yet is years ahead in ambition and achievement.

The Piatti Quartet and Emmanuel Despax start out a little carefully, but their performance soon transforms into something fully involving, if not attaining the heady immediacy of Martha Argerich, Lida Chen and the Capuçons in Lugano in 2006 (Warner Classics). Three evanescent Fauré-ish miniatures by Lucien Durosoir form a delectable pendant to this odd coupling.

DAVID THREASHER