Saint-Saëns Wind Sonatas – Allard, Bourgue, Gab

Saint-Saëns was pushing eighty-six when he wrote those three wind sonatas, holed up in Algiers, dying by inches and still turning out music of perfect classical poise. He knew it, too — told friends he wanted to leave something useful behind for instruments the French chamber repertoire had largely ignored. He never got past oboe, clarinet, and bassoon. The planned cycle for flute, horn, and the rest stayed a good intention, one of music history’s more tantalizing unfinished business items. What we got instead were three late masterpieces of a very particular kind: lean, aphoristic, entirely free of struggle or angst, written by a man who had outlived nearly everyone he started out with and had nothing left to prove.

This disc — originally Indésens, now folded into the Calliope catalog, as so much of that label’s back stock has been — gathers those sonatas with the shorter occasional pieces and the wonderful early Septet, and the vintage tells on it. Five works taped in 1976, the Septet dredged up from 1957, and the notes are stingy with particulars about provenance, engineers, venue. Anyone hunting discographical exactitude will come away hungry.

The playing itself is the case for keeping this release around, imperfect as the engineering is. Maurice Bourgue’s oboe in the Sonata in D major, op. 166, has that unmistakable French reediness — pungent, a little astringent, utterly idiomatic in a way American or German oboists rarely manage even when they try. The opening Andantino sings with real tenderness; Bourgue phrases it the way you’d phrase a Fauré vocalise, all long breath and understatement. But the recording does him no favors. He’s balanced far too close, so that in the Allegro animato his fortissimos turn glary, almost aggressive, and Annie d’Arco’s piano — pushed forward in the mix rather than blended — thumps along beside him with more weight than Saint-Saëns ever intended. This is chamber music, an intimate conversation, and the sonics keep shouting over it.

Maurice Gabai fares somewhat better in the Clarinet Sonata in E flat major, op. 167, a work dedicated to Auguste Périer and one that rewards a player who can float above the staff without forcing. Gabai’s Allegro animato has real bounce, real wit. Trouble comes in the slow movement — that hushed, almost liturgical Lento which some commentators have heard as Saint-Saëns’s own requiem — where the engineers’ insistence on close-miking turns a passage that should dissolve into silence into something oddly present, almost intrusive. And there’s a moment, I noticed it twice on relisten, where the tempo simply loses its nerve and nearly stalls. Not a disaster. Just an unevenness that a producer with a firmer hand might have caught.

Maurice Allard’s bassoon suffers worst of all from the album’s glare. The Sonata in G major, op. 168 — the last of the three, dedicated to Léon Letellier of the Opéra — wants a certain autumnal mellowness, a sense of an old man looking back without regret. Allard has the mastery for the sonata’s puckish faster music, tossing off the triplet passagework with real ease. But the close balance renders his upper register bright to the point of harshness, and d’Arco’s piano, never a beautifully recorded instrument on this disc, takes on a boxy, over-resonant clatter that undercuts what should be autumn light.

The two miniatures are pleasant enough, if inessential next to the sonatas. The Romance in F major, op. 36, for horn, dates from 1874 — Saint-Saëns in his prime, decades before the sonatas, and it shows: more conventionally Romantic, less astringent. Gilbert Coursier plays it warmly. The Cavatine, op. 144, for trombone, written in 1915 for a Conservatoire competition, gets a game reading from Jacques Toulon, though the piece itself is a trifle — charming, forgettable, over in under five minutes.

Best of all, oddly, is the oldest recording here. The Septet in E major, op. 65, for trumpet, string quartet, bass, and piano, comes from 1957, and Jeanne-Marie Darré takes the keyboard part with terrific dash — this is a pianist who’d studied with Marguerite Long and could dispatch Saint-Saëns’s fioritura without breaking a sweat. Roger Delmotte’s trumpet has real swagger in the outer movements, and the whole rendition has a unity and a sense of style that the later sonata recordings, for all their individual excellences, never quite achieve. It’s also, blessedly, far better balanced — proof that decent engineering was entirely possible in this repertoire two decades before Indésens’s own sessions, which makes the sonic shortcomings of the newer material harder to forgive rather than easier.

Collectors wanting these three sonatas in modern, better-engineered sound have plenty of choices now — the Nash Ensemble’s Hyperion disc, or the fine Chandos survey with various principals, both offer more civilized balances without sacrificing character. This historic document remains worth hearing for the quality of the playing and for Darré’s Septet alone, but as a first choice, sonically, it cannot really compete.