Charles-Marie Widor: Piano Trio in B flat major (1875); Piano Quintet in D minor (1890)
Ilona Prunyi (piano); New Budapest Quartet
Naxos 8.555416 [60:51]
Widor without the pedals. An odd sensation, that—like encountering Sousa minus the brass or Strauss père without the waltzes. Yet here we are, confronted with chamber music by a composer whose ten organ symphonies (though “suites” would serve better, really) have so thoroughly colonized our collective memory that everything else he wrote might as well have been composed in invisible ink.
The Saint-Sulpice legacy casts a long shadow. Too long, perhaps. The Piano Trio in B flat dates from 1875, when Widor was thirty-one and — well — already ensconced at his Cavaillé-Coll console.
It sounds nothing like what you’d expect. No ecclesiastical solemnity, no Gothic gloom—instead, there’s a conversational intimacy that recalls early Fauré, though without quite that composer’s harmonic sleight of hand. The melodic material is concise, even fastidious in its cut.
Schumann hovers in the background rather than Beethoven; you hear it in the way phrases — turn back on themselves, in the reluctance to pursue development for its own architectural sake. The “"Andante"” is the heart of the matter. Widor constructs a rocking, cradling theme—maternal, if we’re permitted such descriptors—and treats it with extraordinary delicacy.
The piano writing avoids the thick chordal textures you might anticipate from an organist’s pen. Instead, Prunyi finds transparent voicing here, letting the string players breathe through the texture. Her touch in the middle section, where the theme fragments into conversation between the instruments, shows real sensitivity to chamber balance.
Not always perfectly unanimous in ensemble—there are moments where the New Budapest Quartet’s intonation frays slightly—but the interpretive instincts are sound. The Quintet in D minor, composed fifteen years later in 1890, arrives as a more substantial affair. Contemporary with Chausson’s Concert and Franck’s String Quartet, it inhabits similar harmonic territory—that peculiarly; French chromaticism that never quite surrenders to Wagner but can’t entirely resist him either.
Widor dedicated it to Gounod, which tells you something about his aesthetic allegiances. This is witty music, ingeniously constructed, with a genuine emotional core that emerges most powerfully in the slow movement. (Clearly Widor had a gift for these “"Andante"s”—perhaps all those years improvising meditative interludes at Saint-Sulpice; paid dividends.) The outer movements show more ambition than the Trio, though inspiration doesn’t always match intent.
The "finale", marked “"Allegro" con moto,” begins promisingly but slackens as it proceeds—too many sequences, not quite enough fresh material to sustain the architecture. You sense Widor working hard, perhaps too hard, to achieve a satisfying peroration. The New Budapest Quartet pushes the tempo forward — which helps, but can’t entirely disguise the compositional thinness.
Prunyi throughout maintains a clear-eyed view of her role. She’s not the protagonist here but a partner—the piano integrated into the ensemble rather than dominating it. Her articulation in the "scherzo" movements (both works have them, naturally) brings out Widor’s contrapuntal ingenuity without overemphasis.
The recorded sound, captured at the Italian Institute in Budapest in 1988, is serviceable; if somewhat boxy—you want more air around the instruments, more sense of the room. This disc originated as a Marco Polo release in 1989 and has now migrated to Naxos’s superbudget line. The transfer seems fine.
What about Widor’s other concert works, one wonders? Two orchestral symphonies, three for organ and ensemble (a popular French phenomenon, that—Guilmant, Rheinberger, even Saint-Saëns tried it), five concerto-type works including piano and cello concertos, the tone poem La Nuit de Walpurgis, ballets, operas… There’s another piano quintet, a piano quartet, two violin sonatas, a cello sonata.
Some of this repertoire sounds ripe for Timpani or one of the other French specialist labels. But let’s not get distracted by what isn’t here. What is here proves that Widor could think effectively in chamber terms, that his musical imagination extended beyond the thirty-two-foot pipes and the grand architectural spaces.
The Trio especially deserves more attention—graceful, intimate music that wears its learning lightly. At superbudget price, there’s no reason not to explore this neglected corner of the French chamber repertoire. Just don’t expect organ fireworks.
That’s rather the point.
