Belatedly, and very gradually, we are being made aware of Dohnanyi's chamber music—now being offered, be it noted, by artists from his native Hungary, where he was persona non grata after the war. An immensely accomplished musician pianist, conductor, composer, administrator (he was director of the Budapest Conservatoire from 1919)—his remarkable technical skill was already evident in his Op. 1, the Piano Quintet which he wrote at the age of 17. Brahms programmed this in Vienna in 1895, perhaps touched that this youngster had so patently taken him as a model. His influence is most plainly seen in the second subject of the initial Allegro and in the ensuing Scherzo (which adopts his favourite hemiola cross-rhythms) and its lyrical Trio, though it is Schumann who comes to mind on listening to the slow movement: the finale, in a rather wooden 5/4, is something of a let-down until the advent of a fugue in waltz-time. The performance here is suitably energetic and assured, but the microphone placing picks up too much of the Vienna Schubertsaal's resonance, and its warm acoustics overheat the impassioned writing (particularly in the first movement); the resultant soupiness takes some getting used to.
The first two movements of the harmonically more advanced and rhythmically more flexible Sextet, composed 40 years later, owe more, it is not unfair to say, to technique than to inspiration. The Allegro appassionato overong) only just escapes turgidity, and the most interesting parts of the Intermezzo are march episodes, which have a nightmarish quality; but then comes an extraordinary multi-sectioned movement, beginning with simple charm in a folky Hungarian idiom and later including a deliciously airy 6/8 scherzo, and the merry finale, which follows without a break, is full of high spirits (though not a ''jazz parody'', as the commentator here would have it), incidentally toying with an impudently cross-accented waltz within the 2/4 metre, and teasingly only just not ending in the wrong key. The recording is clearer in this work, but the violin seems disadvantageously placed in relation to the louder clarinet and much louder horn (who, in tutti passages such as the scherzo just mentioned, protrudes somewhat).'