In his youth Sibelius was a keen chamber music player and formed a family piano trio with his brother Christian as cellist, and his sister Linda as pianist. He wrote a good deal of chamber music during these years, and this CD offers three of these juvenilia. The E flat Quartet (1885) is modelled on the Viennese classics and shows that Sibelius knew his Haydn well: the writing is well-schooled and the ideas are not without charm but the music gives little indication of what was to come. With the vantage point of hindsight, however, one can hear overtones of the 1890s in the slow movement of the Loviisa Trio, written in the summer of 1888 in the small town of that name. In his 1961 Finnish study of Sibelius's unpublished chamber music, John Rosas quotes Sibelius's secretary, Santeri Levas, as saying that in all his correspondence with the Sibelius Museum in Abo (or Turku), the composer was at pains to emphasize that these chamber works were neither to be published nor performed—even after his death. He did ask to see the score of the Loviisa Trio, which the Museum had acquired from Adolf Paul in the 1930s, as he had completely forgotten it, and he eventually allowed it to be performed when the Museum was inaugurated in 1952. I doubt whether he would be very pleased to see either piece on record, although they have obvious curiosity value and fill in the picture of his artistic growth. They are well played and recorded.
The Piano Quintet is more substantial fare, and listening to this excellent performance I felt Sibelius was perhaps too harsh in dismissing it in a letter to his friend, Werner Soderhjelm, as ''absolute rubbish''. In the early 1960s Rosas thought it unlikely that it had ever been performed in its entirety (only two movements were played in May 1890, and Sibelius only found the score in 1910). Erik Tawaststjerna fils and the Sibelius Academy Quartet are highly accomplished advocates of the Quintet, and their reading is in some ways tauter than that of Anthony Goldstone and the Gabrielis on Chandos. They play the five movements in the same order as in the score, with the scherzo coming after the Intermezzo and the Andante. The quartet-playing is vital and alert, and Tawaststjerna is, of course, steeped in this music even if Goldstone, perhaps, brings greater sparkle to its scherzo. The Chandos recording has the warmer, more resonant acoustic but the Finlandia disc is very clean. If you have not yet acquired the Chandos and have the Voces intimae Quartet anyway, the present issue would be a logical choice: if you have the Chandos, there is absolutely no need to add to it.'