Juon Sextet and Chamber Works – Rediscovered

Paul Juon is one of those composers history swallowed whole and hasn’t bothered to cough back up. Born in Moscow in 1872 to a family of Swiss descent, trained in Berlin under Woldemar Bargiel — himself a stepbrother of Clara Schumann — he spent decades teaching at the Hochschule there, published prolifically, earned the admiration of colleagues who knew better than posterity has, and then simply vanished from the concert life of the West. Not forgotten so much as never quite remembered. That’s the kind of injustice a release like this one is positioned to remedy, though whether the remedy takes is another question entirely.

The Sextet in C minor, Op. 22, is the earlier of the two works here, and it announces itself with an almost belligerent seriousness — the piano laying out the first subject with a baldness that feels almost confrontational, as if Juon were daring you to find it merely competent. C minor, that Beethovenian key of moral consequence, gives the movement its backbone, and the scoring — two cellos reinforcing the viola rather than the more conventional single lower string — keeps the texture weighted low, almost earthbound. Heavy bass chords accumulate. The overall tessitura stays down in a register where things brood rather than sing. Juon himself described his music as harsh and of “gloomy Nordic colouration,” but that’s a composer being too hard on himself. Gloomy isn’t quite right. Serious is. There’s a difference, and it matters.

The first movement is long — longer than the remaining three combined — and its Brahmsian inheritance is unmistakable, particularly in the piano writing, which at moments could almost be lifted from Brahms’s own Piano Quartet No. 3 in C minor. But Juon earns the comparison rather than being crushed by it. The second subject, introduced by the viola, opens into something warmer, and by the time the exposition pivots toward the relative major, you feel the music has actually arrived somewhere, not merely transited.

What’s clever — quietly clever — is the handling of the middle movements. The Andantino quasi Allegretto and the Minuetto are really two halves of a single statement: a hymn-like theme first announced by the piano, followed by seven variations distributed across both movements. Five variations in the Andantino, two more in the Minuetto. It’s an unusual formal decision, and it works because the variations themselves are genuinely inventive rather than merely decorative — each one finding a new angle on material that could easily have been exhausted. The brief Intermezzo that follows is lighter still, almost teasing, and that lightness is exactly what the finale needs to push against. The finale itself is rhythmically insistent, inflected with something that sounds like Russian folk idiom without being folkloristic — the difference between a scent and a quotation.

The Quintet, Op. 50, is another matter entirely — a fully mature work, later in date and more assured in every dimension. The opening Allegro moderato runs nearly a quarter-hour and moves with the kind of passionate, forward-leaning momentum that makes you think of early Schreker or the Zemlinsky of the string quartets — composers working in that charged atmospheric space between late Romanticism and whatever came after it. The movement ends in something close to serenity, which is not where it starts; it earns its arrival. The sense of a completed emotional arc, of a sonata structure that actually goes somewhere and comes back changed, is one of the things that separates composers with genuine structural instincts from those who merely fill in the expected boxes.

Juon had those instincts. That’s the discovery here.

Whether this recording will open doors that have stayed shut for over a century depends partly on the performances, which are committed and technically unimpeachable. The ensemble plays with evident conviction — the kind of conviction that comes not from manufactured enthusiasm but from musicians who have clearly lived with this music long enough to trust it. The balance between piano and strings is well judged; the lower strings never muddy the texture even when the writing asks them to pile on. Jörg Hillebrand’s notes in the booklet are genuinely illuminating rather than merely promotional.

There are no competing versions to weigh this against for the Quintet — Juon’s chamber music remains almost entirely unrecorded — which means this disc occupies its territory without rivals. That should not make it seem like a niche acquisition for specialists. It isn’t. This is music that rewards attention from anyone who has ever felt that the standard chamber music canon has been traced around the same familiar coastline too many times. Juon drew a different map. It’s time to look at it.