Another month, another chamber West Side Story. In the December issue of Gramophone I reviewed the Labèque Sisters’ performance of the transcription Irwin Kostal arranged for the four-handed sorority, but despite Kostal’s eminence as Bernstein’s original orchestrator, concluded that West Side Story and chamber forces are ultimately irreconcilable.

Trio Panta Rhei make even heavier weather of their boiled-down Symphonic Dances. Gudrun Pagel finds the melodic contours of ‘Somewhere’ tailor-made for a violinist but the trio fall into deep trouble during those numbers where big-band physicality and a jazz idiom come as standard. Julia Vaisberg’s piano-playing is appropriately gnarly but the strings lack precision enough to carry the ‘Prologue’, while ‘Mambo’ and especially the fugue from ‘Cool’ fall victim to some gruesomely acid intonation and feeble rhythmic attack. And whoever reckoned dropping bits of ‘America’ into ‘The Rumble’ as flashbacks was a good idea ought to be dragged down the station house by Officer Krupke.

Their Porgy and Bess, although not entirely free from iffy intonation, nails the dramatic trajectory of Igor Frolov’s paraphrase rather well, but the other works disappoint. Daniel Schnyder’s Worlds Beyond and Nikolai Kapustin’s Trio tinker boringly with jazz licks; Gene Pritsker’s Everything Profound is built on stock light-music sequences. Pritsker says in his programme-note that ‘all music is good music as long as it is played well’. Just thought I’d quote that and leave the inference hanging.