Saint-Saëns Piano Quartet and Quintet – Ortiz

Somewhere in the vast unglamorous middle of the nineteenth-century French repertoire, Saint-Saëns keeps waiting for us to catch up with him. He wrote too easily, too well, for too long, and the twentieth century punished him for it — decided he was facile, decided Debussy and the new gods had rendered him obsolete. Nonsense, all of it. This new disc, with the Fine Arts Quartet and the Brazilian pianist Cristina Ortiz, makes as persuasive a case as I’ve heard lately for a serious reconsideration.

Start with the piano quintet, composed when Saint-Saëns was not yet twenty — a young man’s piece, unmistakably, full of Mendelssohnian energy and a certain showing-off that youth is entitled to. The opening movement has a tune that anticipates, spookily, the Dvořák Piano Quintet in A major that wouldn’t exist for another three decades. Coincidence, surely. Ghosts don’t compose backward. But it’s the kind of detail that makes you sit up in your chair. The andante is where the real interest lies, harmonically more adventurous than anything around it, and Saint-Saëns links it directly into the scherzo without pause — a structural boldness that the callow first movement doesn’t quite prepare you for.

Decades later he returned to the genre — sort of — with the Piano Quartet in B flat, his second (the first, oddly, remains harder to find on disc; one hopes somebody is readying a companion release). This is the mature Saint-Saëns, and it is gorgeous. Every movement but the opening one begins in minor, a small but telling shadow cast across a work whose real subject is beauty itself, pursued almost as an ethical project. There’s drama here, yes, even turbulence, but the finale unfolds with an expansive, almost epic breath, and passages throughout sound uncannily like Fauré before Fauré had fully arrived at himself. Historical irony: the student anticipating the teacher’s language. Saint-Saëns taught Fauré, after all, at the École Niedermeyer — so maybe it runs both directions.

The Barcarolle in F major, tucked between the two larger works, is the disc’s small perfect thing. Viola and cello rock gently against each other, an easy back-and-forth swell, while the piano writing glows above it with that generous melodic gift Saint-Saëns never got sufficient credit for. Nine minutes, and I wanted nine more.

Rendition-wise, this is luxury casting. The Fine Arts Quartet — an ensemble now well into its eighth decade of existence, though obviously with much-changed personnel since the Bartók-championing days of the 1950s — plays with a lush, unforced warmth that suits this repertoire ideally. They don’t rush. They let the inner voices breathe, let the cello sing out when it needs to instead of receding into accompaniment. Ortiz, a pianist too rarely mentioned these days outside her long-ago Rachmaninoff sets, brings clarity and a lovely, unfussy legato — she’s played this kind of French-adjacent repertoire before, notably with this same quartet in Fauré and Franck, and the ease of the collaboration shows in every phrase.

Is there competition worth worrying about? A little — older recordings of the quintet exist, and specialists in French chamber music have occasionally circled this repertoire, but nothing currently on disc combines both the quartet and the quintet with this much finish, this much evident joy in the playing. The engineering helps enormously: warm, close, but not claustrophobic, with the piano nicely integrated rather than dominating.

I confess I came to this music skeptically, half-expecting charming trifles. What I got instead was persuasive, sometimes moving, occasionally startling evidence that the chamber music of Saint-Saëns deserves a permanent place in the repertoire, not just a rescue mission every few decades. Recommended, unreservedly — and worth returning to more than once.