Dvořák Chamber Works – Vogler and Friends

Moritzburg has always struck me as one of those festivals where the music sounds like it’s being discovered rather than performed — young players thrown in with seasoned ones, everybody a little unsure who’s teaching whom. Jan Vogler runs the place, and has for two decades now. The results of that particular chemistry have finally made their way onto disc, with mixed but genuinely interesting results.

Dvořák is the obvious composer for this kind of enterprise. He was, after all, a violist himself, spent years scraping out a living in provincial theater orchestras before Brahms and Hanslick took notice, and he never lost the ear of a working chamber artist. Someone who knew what it felt like from inside the ensemble, not just from the podium or the writing desk. That knowledge saturates every bar of the Piano Quartet No. 2 in E-flat major, op. 87, and it comes through here, though not without some rough patches.

Kevin Zhu leads the quartet with a tone that’s leaner than I’d like in the opening Allegro con fuoco. There’s fire, certainly, but it occasionally reads as agitation rather than combustion. The Lento redeems everything. Here the group settles into the work’s long melodic paragraphs with real tenderness; Matthew Lipman’s viola sings out with a burnished, almost cello-like warmth in the inner voices, and Pohjonen’s piano — never assertive, always listening — cushions rather than competes. The Ländler-inflected opening of the Scherzo has real lift, a rustic swing that avoids preciousness. I’ve heard grander accounts of this quartet, the old Suk-led recordings, or more recently the Jerusalem Quartet’s collaboration with pianists who understand its Brahmsian weight, but few with this much unguarded youthful candor.

The “Dumky” Trio is, of course, the calling card. Everyone plays it; not everyone understands why its six sections resist the tidy sonata logic listeners keep hoping to impose on them. Dvořák built the piece on the dumka’s essential instability, lament curdling suddenly into dance, melancholy that won’t stay put, and Chad Hoopes, leading here with real temperament, seems to grasp that structural restlessness rather than fight it. The finale’s furiant-adjacent energy crackles. Pohjonen again impresses; his articulation in the faster episodes has a MacDowell-Club clarity, never blurred, even when the tempo pushes hard. Is it the finest “Dumky” on disc? No. I’d still reach for the old Suk Trio, or for Kavakos-Ma-Ax when I want polish burnished to a high gloss. But this version has blood in it, an unpredictability that feels earned rather than manufactured.

The Terzetto excerpt is a curious inclusion, just the Scherzo, plucked out like a single flower from a bouquet nobody bothered to show you in full. As a standalone party piece it works, danced with real snap by Hoopes and colleagues, the double-stops crunchy and rhythmically alert. But I confess mild irritation at the truncation. Dvořák wrote the whole piece for a reason. Excerpting favors marketing over musicianship, and Sony surely knows better.

Vogler’s own arrangement of “Songs My Mother Taught Me” opens the album, and here I’ll admit unqualified pleasure. Two minutes, fifteen seconds of pure vocal transference. The cello doesn’t imitate the voice so much as remember it, with Vogler drawing out the melody’s folk-inflected sorrow without milking it. Pohjonen’s accompaniment breathes with him. It’s over before you’ve settled into your chair, and that’s rather the point.

Sound engineering from Drew University’s concert hall is warm, perhaps a touch resonant in the bass. Vogler’s lower register occasionally blooms more than ideal, but nothing that undermines the performances’ immediacy.

This isn’t a Dvořák album for listeners wanting definitive statements. It’s an album for listeners who want to overhear something alive, slightly imperfect, full of the specific joy of good players who trust each other. On those terms, it succeeds handsomely.