SCHUBERT Trout Quintet (Thymos Quartet)

Record and Artist Details

Composer or Director: Jean-Frédéric Neuburger

Genre:

Chamber

Label: Avie

Media Format: CD or Download

Media Runtime: 54

Mastering:

DDD

Catalogue Number: AV2416

AV2416. SCHUBERT Trout Quintet (Thymos Quartet)

Tracks:

Composition Artist Credit
Quintet for Piano and Strings, 'Trout' Franz Schubert, Composer
Christoph Eschenbach, Piano
Thymos Quartet
Schubertiade, Movement: Selected Waltzes Olivier Dejours, Composer
Thymos Quartet
Yann Dubost, Double bass
(17) Ländler, Movement: No. 8 in D Franz Schubert, Composer
Jean-Frédéric Neuburger, Composer
(12) Deutsche (Ländler), Movement: D Franz Schubert, Composer
Jean-Frédéric Neuburger, Composer
(17) Ländler, Movement: No. 15 in D flat Franz Schubert, Composer
Jean-Frédéric Neuburger, Composer

Christoph Eschenbach and the Thymos Quartet had me smiling from the very first bars of Schubert’s Trout Quintet. How affectionately they lean on the gentle leading tones, and how subtly they shade the subsequent (and surprising) harmonic shifts. It’s a performance teeming with delightful incident right the way through, in fact, yet such consistent attention to detail never precludes expansive phrasing or inhibits burbling rhythmic vivacity. The Andante’s relaxed, tender atmosphere is a raptly sustained idyll – that astonishing lift from G to A flat (after the fermata at 3'45") feels like stepping through a secret door – and the Scherzo’s repeated notes are akin to mirthful laughter. The fourth movement can be bit of a slog in some performances, but not this one, which is vividly characterised. I’m especially grateful that Eschenbach’s shapely and feather-light playing in the third variation has nothing remotely étude-like about it.

If only Avie had given us more of Eschenbach, whose supple rubato sounds utterly natural. By contrast, Jean-Frédéric Neuburger’s playing in a brief selection of Ländler seems studied and slightly awkward. Thankfully, the Thymos’s reading of excerpts from a substantial set of waltzes, D146, proves far more satisfying. Not only is the playing itself enchanting but Olivier Dejour’s string quintet arrangement abounds with felicities while remaining true to the piano originals. Listen at 3'09", for instance, where Dejours artfully introduces pizzicato to the texture, preparing the ear for a predominantly pizzicato treatment of the next waltz. It’s seven minutes of gemütlich bliss, and icing on the cake for one of the most delectable performances of the Trout Quintet on record.

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