Cesar Franck is usually seen as a classic case of a late developing composer, something he shares perhaps with Bruckner, and oddly enough they have in common a spiritual and occasionally archaic quality. But the fact that Franck's major success and masterpieces came in the last decade or so of his long life, after 1880, does not mean that he wrote no early works or that those which exist lack merit. Nevertheless they have never caught on, and listening to the opening Andante con moto of the F sharp minor Trio concertant of 1841 one can see why; it plods along with a peasant earnestness and the later metronomic accompaniment in quavers seems to me mildly comic until it gets plain irritating, though I don't forget that Messiaen has used similar and even slower accompaniments of repeated chords. At any rate, naivety is a major factor here, and it's reflected too in harmony which frequently bogs down on the tonic chord—try from 4'53'' to 6'26'' in that movement and hear not only this but a 'melody' that offers little more than slow scale passages ascending and descending. Unbelievably, it happens again at 11'28''. This whole movement—all 13 minutes of it—is so badly composed that if a student had produced it in 1841 (or 1881 for that matter) it would surely have been dismissed as such; whether you think the fact that Franck wrote the piece makes it interesting is of course another question. Strangely enough, rich harmonic invention and wide ranging modulation are major features of his better-known and vastly preferable later music.
After this, things improve—as Stravinsky once said in another context, ''it could hardly be otherwise''—and, thank goodness, the Allegro molto of this trio is more inventive, alive and terse; one might suspect the influence of Brahms were it not for the fact that that composer was as yet just a boy. Here, too, Franck gets stuck in a groove from 3'56'' to 5'13'', but elsewhere there's at last evidence of a real composer in the making, though few people would recognize the Franck that was to come. The big finale, though somewhat simple-minded, has a real sweep. I've spent a lot of space on a single work and said nothing of the performances by the young Romanian artists that are committed, skilful and as persuasive as anyone could expect—and though I've been dismissive about the music I did already know it and indeed possess another recording of it (by the Foerster Trio on a Supraphon LP—12/72, nla).
The Second, Third and Fourth Trios are more successful, I think, because the material is more personal and more skilfully handled, but a certain youthful gaucherie remains, for example in the Minuetto of No. 2—a work which gains, however, by not being too grandiloquent. Both the Third and Fourth are in B minor and in fact it was on Liszt's suggestion that the original finale of the first of these became the single movement No. 4 of no less than 18 minutes' length. This was dedicated to him, while another movement was written to end No. 3.
Neither of the smaller pieces which makes up this two disc set stands out as memorable even by the standards of lesser composers, and neither foreshadows the distinction of later Franck; incidentally, although the composer appears not to have attached a key to the Andantino quietoso, it begins and ends in E flat minor, not major as given in the booklet—where, by the way, a note admits that ''it exhausts much of its vitality in its numerous repeats''. After all this, the great Violin Sonata of 1886 takes us into a quite different world. Though the initial Allegro moderato is surely too slow, the work as a whole is played with the right kind of fervour and Mariana Sirbu and Mihail Sarbu are equal to the considerable technical difficulties, not least the notorious ones of the piano part which seems to demand an exceptionally big hand—I write with feeling as one who has played it. The recording of 1981-2 is faithful.'