Gramophone Chamber Award 2024: Schumann's Piano Quartet & Quintet

Wednesday, October 2, 2024

Familiar works are given an invigoratingly fresh perspective by Isabelle Faust, Anne Katharina Schreiber, Antoine Tamestit, Jean-Guihen Queyras and Alexander Melnikov

Isabelle Faust, Antoine Tamestit, Jean-Guihen Queyras and Alexander Melnikov are on a roll. In 2019, these musicians won a Gramophone Award for their searching Harmonia Mundi recording of Debussy’s late sonatas. Then, just last year, Tamestit won again for a vibrant Erato album of two Mozart string quintets with the Ébène Quartet. This new, all-Schumann Harmonia Mundi album is yet another triumph, and the magic is palpable from the expectant hush of the Piano Quartet’s slow introduction all the way through to the exultant fugue that caps the Piano Quintet.

These players are all as comfortable on period instruments as they are on modern ones, and although they use the former in this case, they have no apparent scholarly or interpretative axe to grind. Indeed, never does expression take a back seat to clarity; rather, the extraordinary transparency here only enhances the music’s emotional punch.

There’s something new to discover almost everywhere on this beautifully engineered recording

Similarly, although these performances are lavishly detailed, the ensemble always keeps the bigger picture clearly in mind so that individual phrases, musical paragraphs, whole movements and, ultimately, entire works gather and unfold with a sense of vision and purpose. Listening to the cello and viola duet (played so confidentially and seamlessly by Queyras and Tamestit) in the opening Allegro brillante of the Quintet, say, or to the almost whispered rapture of the Piano Quartet’s Andante cantabile, I can’t help but hear Robert and Clara’s loving murmurs.

There’s something new to discover almost everywhere on this beautifully engineered recording, in fact, and to have these well-worn works transformed into such vivid, memorable journeys – well, that’s a gift to savour. Andrew Farach‑Colton