There is a peculiar loneliness to Chausson’s place in the repertoire — admired by those who know him, ignored by everyone else. He died at forty-four, his bicycle having carried him into an obstruction on the grounds of his own country estate in 1899, and the accident has always seemed to those who love his music like one of fate’s more gratuitous cruelties. What he left behind is not a large catalogue, but the best of it — the Poème de l’amour et de la mer, the Symphony in B-flat, the opera Le roi Arthus — burns with an intensity that puts much longer careers to shame.
The Concert for violin, piano and string quartet in D, op. 21 is the crown of that legacy.
Not concerto. Concert. The distinction matters enormously, and recordings that miss it tend to produce performances that miss the piece. When Itzhak Perlman and Jorge Bolet recorded this work with the Juilliard Quartet some years back, the result was magnificent in its way — glossy, expansive, every phrase shaped with the confidence of soloists accustomed to filling Carnegie Hall. But Chausson didn’t write Carnegie Hall music here. He wrote something more intimate and more radical: a chamber work in which the violin and piano are, as the title implies, participants in a conversation rather than protagonists in a drama. The thematic weight does fall somewhat more heavily on those two players, yes — but only somewhat. Think of it less as a hierarchy than as a six-way negotiation, conducted in Chausson’s characteristic language of yearning, which draws so deeply on Franck’s cyclic methods and Wagner’s chromatic procedures that it sometimes sounds like it’s trying to dissolve the boundary between chamber music and the late Romantic orchestral universe.
Jennifer Pike and Tom Poster understand all of this instinctively, and so do their colleagues in the Doric Quartet.
What strikes you immediately about this reading is the quality of listening — the way the ensemble breathes together, the way Pike’s violin line tapers at phrase endings to allow Poster’s piano, or the quartet’s inner voices, room to emerge. There is a particular moment in the slow movement, that long-limbed, aching Sicilienne, where the texture thins to almost nothing and the music seems to hover — and the Doric players hold that stillness without flinching, without rushing toward resolution. That takes nerve, and it takes trust in the composer.
Pike plays superbly throughout, her tone warm without being overripe, her intonation clean even in the highest reaches of the finale. Poster is her equal: rhythmically alert, coloristically varied, never hammering when the texture calls for transparency.
The String Quartet in c minor, op. 35, is another matter — and a sadder one. Chausson had composed all but a few bars of the third movement when he rode out that afternoon and never came back. Vincent d’Indy completed it, as he completed so many things for the Franck circle, but the work bears the mark of its interruption. You can hear Chausson in transition here — reaching away from Franck’s dense chromaticism toward something lighter, more etched, more — though the word would have startled him — Impressionist. The opening movement’s close does indeed carry an unmistakable echo of the opening of Debussy’s string quartet, written six years earlier; and the second movement’s chromatic upward thrust will remind any attentive listener of the Tristan prelude, refracted now through Chausson’s own particular melancholy. These are not weaknesses. They are signs of a composer still becoming.
The Doric players bring exactly the right sound to this music — lean but not cold, suffused with color but never muddy, their vibrato calibrated for intimacy rather than projection.
Taken together, this disc makes the strongest possible case that Chausson’s neglect is our loss, not his fault. Decisive recommendation.
