Gouvy: Piano Trios Nos. 2-4 – Voces Intimae

There used to be a parlor game among nineteenth-century music historians: who is the most unjustly forgotten composer of the age? Gouvy’s name always came up, usually offered with a shrug, as if his very success at living between two musical cultures had doomed him to belong to neither. Born in Lorraine but educated and largely championed in Germany, he wrote symphonies that Brahms respected and chamber music that Joachim was glad to play, and still the Parisian establishment could not be bothered. Berlioz, of all people, tried to shame his countrymen into paying attention. It did not much work then. It is only slowly working now.

These three trios come from a fertile decade, 1847 to 1858, when Gouvy was finding his voice somewhere between Schubertian song and the contrapuntal discipline he absorbed from close study of Bach and Mendelssohn. You hear both strands constantly: a genial, unhurried melodic gift wedded to inner voices that actually go somewhere, violin and cello trading motives with a seriousness you don’t always get from salon-adjacent trios of the period. The op. 19 in particular has a first movement that bounces in on itself with real wit, then turns around and does something quietly contrapuntal that catches you off guard.

None of this would land without playing of real conviction. Voces Intimae give it that in spades.

The choice to use a period Pleyel, an 1848 instrument, dry-toned, occasionally almost harp-like in its decay, could easily curdle into an exercise in scholarly self-denial. It doesn’t. Riccardo Ceccetti draws a startling amount of color from the thing. There’s a woody thump in the bass that a modern Steinway would simply iron flat, and in the upper register a bell-like transparency that lets the gut-strung violin and cello sit inside the texture rather than fight against it. I gather this same ensemble’s Schumann album drew some resistance on exactly these grounds, the fortepiano too thin, too effortful against the strings. Whatever the truth of that complaint, it does not apply here. The balance in the Gouvy is well judged, the instruments occupying a shared sonic space rather than three separate ones spliced together in a control room. If anything the engineering pushes a shade too bright in places, climaxes have an edge that a more distant microphone placement might have softened, but on a decent pair of speakers this settles down within a minute or two.

Luigi De Filippi’s violin tone is lean rather than lush, vibrato used sparingly and mostly as ornament rather than as a permanent wash of sound. Exactly right for this repertoire, which asks for clarity of line over Romantic upholstery. Sandro Meo’s cello playing has weight without wallow. Listen to how he shapes the opening statement of the op. 22’s slow movement, letting it breathe without ever letting the pulse go slack.

Is there real competition for this repertoire on disc? No. That in itself makes this release worth having regardless of any reservations about track selection. Gouvy wrote five piano trios altogether, and the decision to give us three from the middle of that output rather than assemble a complete cycle across two discs is a curious one, especially given how much room was left unused on the second CD. A missed opportunity, and one hopes a sequel is already being planned rather than left to some future label’s initiative decades hence.

But grumbling about programming choices shouldn’t obscure the main point. This is persuasive advocacy for music that has waited far too long for it. Gouvy is not Brahms, and he knew it; he wasn’t trying to be. What he offers instead is real craftsmanship, an unforced lyrical charm, and moments of harmonic surprise that reward repeated listening rather than exhausting themselves on first encounter. Recommended without reservation, and with real hope for a follow-up disc to finish what this one so tantalizingly begins.