Saint-Saëns Chamber Music – Piano Quartet and Quintet by Naxos

Saint-Saëns remains one of classical music’s great misunderstood figures. The caricature — the facile technician, the reactionary scold who hounded Franck and dismissed Debussy — has proven remarkably durable, and it has done real damage to his reputation in the chamber music department especially. People who adore the Second Piano Concerto or sit contentedly through Samson et Dalila somehow feel they need permission to love the string quartets, the piano trios, the sonatas. This Naxos release, pairing the Piano Quartet in b-flat major with the earlier Piano Quintet in a minor and the late Barcarolle in f major, is the kind of modest, well-played, well-recorded disc that quietly makes the case without arguing it.

Start with the Barcarolle, because that is where any honest listener will want to linger. Composed in 1897, when Saint-Saëns was sixty-two and had long since buried most of his closest friends, the piece has a quality of autumnal pleasure that is almost heartbreaking in its ease. The cello’s opening gesture — a gentle, rocking figure that really does suggest oars pulling through dark water — establishes a physical sensation before a note of melody has been heard. The piano enters like light on a canal surface, fragmented and glittering, and then something opens up: a long lyrical span for the upper strings, warm and unhurried, embroidered with the kind of chromatic inner voice that Saint-Saëns handles with a naturalness no amount of theoretical sophistication quite explains. The middle section grows turbulent, briefly — not stormy exactly, more like a sudden shift in the weather that passes before you’ve fully registered it. Then the gondola drifts back into the calm, and the piece ends as if it had never really needed to begin. Nine minutes. Exquisite. Efim Boico and Nicolò Eugelmi play the string writing with real sensitivity to its chamber-music intimacy, and Cristina Ortiz — always a pianist who knows when to lead and when to accompany — keeps her touch luminous throughout.

The Piano Quartet is harder to love at first encounter, not because it withholds its charms but because they are so various. The opening movement belongs to the world of Fauré — that relaxed, intimate lyricism that feels somehow both modest and inexhaustible — and it is easy to miss how carefully constructed the thing is beneath the sunny surface. The second movement is more interesting, and more surprising. The piano opens with chords that are — there is no other word — pompous, and Saint-Saëns knows they are pompous; the strings respond with something that begins as agreement and shades quickly into gentle mockery. It is a witty exchange, the kind that makes you think of a composer who spent decades at the center of Parisian musical life and had very firm opinions about everybody in it. The contrapuntal writing that eventually takes over is serious in a different way — focused, almost stern — and the transition is handled with a subtlety that repays attention. The third movement skips and hops, with cadenzas for violin and piano that have the spontaneous quality of improvisation even when you know perfectly well they don’t. And the finale — substantially the longest movement, which is unusual enough to notice — pulls material from earlier in the quartet and drives it toward a conclusion that is genuinely joyous. The glissandi near the end are dizzying in the best sense: you don’t see them coming and they leave you slightly breathless.

Ralph Evans and Ortiz are the dominant presences here, and they have clearly thought hard about the work’s tonal character. Evans plays with clean intonation and a tone that is silvery rather than fat — right for this music, I think, though some will want more weight in the finale.

The Piano Quintet is the outlier on this disc, and the most revealing document. Saint-Saëns wrote it at nineteen or so, and the sheer confidence of it is almost unsettling. This is not the precocious confidence of a prodigy showing off — though there is some of that too, inevitably — but the confidence of a young composer who already knew how large-scale structures work and was not afraid to use them. The opening movement is epic in its ambitions, the piano cast almost as a concerto soloist, the strings providing lyrical counterweight to the keyboard’s assertiveness. The slow movement is the most unexpected thing in the piece: a hymn-like theme of genuine reverence, the texture suddenly hushed and trembling, as though the nineteen-year-old had surprised himself with his own seriousness. The Presto that follows — attacca, without a break — releases the tension with something close to relief.

Competing versions of this particular combination of works are not exactly plentiful. The Barcarolle has been recorded a few times in various arrangements and it is sometimes encountered on survey discs, but this pairing feels genuinely useful. At Naxos price, it is more than that.