Bridge, Bax, Walton Piano Quartets – Cappa Ensemble

There is something faintly perverse about English chamber music of the piano quartet variety — a genre the Germans and French mostly left to their students, but which produced, in the hands of Bridge, Bax, and Walton, some of the most emotionally naked music of the early twentieth century. This new disc from the Cappa Ensemble makes the case, once again, that the repertoire deserves better than its reputation as a byway.

Frank Bridge wrote his Phantasy for Piano Quartet in F-sharp minor in 1910, for the Cobbett competition, that curious philanthropic enterprise that fished so much good music out of British composers by dangling prize money in front of them and insisting on a single-movement format derived, more or less, from the old fantasia. Bridge’s piece runs to just over thirteen minutes here, and the Cappa players catch its mercurial shifts of mood without smoothing them into something merely pretty. Michael McHale’s piano playing has an almost Ravelian glitter in the faster passages. He never lets it curdle into showiness. I still find myself returning, out of long habit, to the old Dartington Piano Trio disc with Patrick Ireland on viola, a Hyperion Helios budget disc that has never sounded dated to my ears, not once in the twenty-odd years I’ve owned it. The Cappa version doesn’t dislodge that allegiance, quite, but it comes close, and Bartosz Woroch’s violin has a burnished, almost covered tone in the work’s darker pages that the Dartington leader didn’t quite match.

Bax’s Piano Quartet of 1922 gets far less exposure than it should. One movement, structurally continuous, harmonically restless: it inhabits that peculiar Baxian world where Celtic twilight modality collides with something closer to Scriabin. The performance here has real heat to it. Adam Newman’s viola sings out in the work’s central paragraphs with a burred, husky warmth that reminded me, oddly, of Frederick Riddle’s old BBC broadcasts. High praise, and I don’t offer it lightly. Whether Bax intended his one-movement form as a direct answer to the Cobbett phantasy tradition is a matter for musicologists to argue over. What matters here is that the piece never sags, even at its most sequence-heavy moments, which is not something one can say of every Bax interpretation I’ve sat through.

Ian Wilson’s Noct is the disc’s wild card, commissioned, evidently, with these players in mind. Wilson has a knack for writing string textures that hover rather than declare themselves, and the piano writing has a spare, almost nocturnal transparency (the title tells you as much). It sits oddly, chronologically, between Bax and Walton, but programmatically it works rather well as a palate-cleanser: thirteen minutes of near-stillness before the emotional avalanche of the Walton quartet that follows.

And that Walton is the reason to buy this disc.

Written when the composer was barely seventeen and revised substantially years later, the Piano Quartet in D minor still carries the fingerprints of a teenager working things out, occasionally too much incident crammed into too little space, particularly in the first movement, but the slow movement has an ache to it that the mature Walton of the Viola Concerto would recognize as entirely his own. Thirty minutes is a long haul for this idiom, and not every account justifies the length. The Maggini Quartet with Peter Donohoe on Naxos remains formidably good, lean, urgent, almost aggressive in the scherzo, while the Nash Ensemble’s Hyperion account, more spacious and more warmly recorded, has long struck me as the classier all-around option, not least for its generous and intelligently chosen couplings. The Cappa Ensemble doesn’t quite topple either. Brian O’Kane’s cello, though, deserves particular mention: dark-grained, unforced, never scooping for effect, and in the slow movement he shapes the long paragraphs with a patience that many more famous quartets rush straight past.

Recorded sound is clean, close without being airless, the piano never swallowing the strings, no small feat in this repertoire, where balance problems have sunk more than one otherwise decent account. Nimbus’s engineers at Wyastone Leys know this repertoire’s pitfalls by now. They’ve been at it long enough.

Is this a first choice? For the Walton, probably not, given the Nash and the Maggini still standing sentry. For the Bax, very possibly yes. It’s an unaccountably neglected work and here it gets an advocacy that borders on the passionate. Taken as a whole, though, four works, four different sound-worlds, one refreshingly unshowy young ensemble, this disc earns its place. Not a library-shelf essential, perhaps, but a genuinely enjoyable and often illuminating couple of hours, and worth the modest outlay for the Bax and the Wilson alone.