Not since the Cummings Trio and Anthony Goldstone back in 1987 has any team come to the rescue of the three piano quartets Beethoven completed at the age of 15 but subsequently suppressed. So this new French issue of those works (posthumously published by Artaria at the end of 1828), in double harness with the 26-year-old composer's piano quartet arrangement of his Op. 16 Quintet for piano and wind, is more than welcome—despite its shortish playing time.
Indebted to the still youthful Mozart the teenage Beethoven may well (and should) have been, as also tempted to entrust too much to the piano. But what struck me most of all was the unpredictability of even immature genius. Never can you for a second foretell what surprise, whether of key, mode, rhythm or scoring, lies just around the corner. His fluent, confident craftsmanship makes you marvel no less. Even when borrowing the three-movement sequence of Mozart's G major Violin Sonata (K397) for his own E flat major work, Beethoven surely gives his chromatically intensified opening Adagio assai, his stormy minor-key Allegro and even the beguiling variations, an unmistakable stamp of his own.
The playing itself of course contributes to the pleasure, with first praise to Philippe Cassard for never allowing the keyboard to dominate. But all four Paris Conservatoire-trained colleagues are artists of taste and finesse. Their characterization is most sensitively attuned to the music's own true scale. Never does point-making sound self-consciously inflated. In the more familiar Op. 16 work I found them just as persuasive as Isaac Stern and his colleagues in their recent Beethoven/Schumann coupling, where the Americans, with their sharper accentuation, opt for more urgency in the faster flanking movements. The Auvidis Valois recording itself has a pleasingly soft-grained intimacy. R1 '9505057'