Piano Quartets by the Cappa Ensemble: Bridge, Bax and Walton

Somewhere in a drawer at my house there is a cassette — yes, a cassette — of the Nash Ensemble playing the Walton Piano Quartet in a Jordan Hall broadcast sometime in the mid-1980s, and I have never quite forgiven myself for not transferring it before the tape began to shed its oxide. I mention this only because the piece has haunted me for thirty years without ever quite achieving the currency it deserves, and here comes another attempt to give it standing: the Cappa Ensemble, a young Irish-based group, pairing it with Bridge, Bax, and a new work by Ian Wilson that has no business sounding as good as it does next to these three titans of English (and Anglo-Irish) chamber music.

Start with the Bridge. The Phantasy Piano Quartet in F-sharp minor comes from 1910, still inside the long Edwardian afternoon before the war blew a hole through English pastoralism, and it wears its Brahms and its Fauré comfortably, though there’s a harmonic restlessness in it — a tendency to slip sideways rather than resolve — that anticipates the later, harder Bridge of the 1920s, the Bridge that so unsettled his adoring pupil Britten’s more conservative teachers at the Royal College. The Cappa players give it a reading that’s mobile without being hasty; Michael McHale’s piano has exactly the right liquid transparency in the triplet figuration, never thickening the texture, and Bartosz Woroch leads the strings with a tone that’s silvery rather than plush. My longtime reference recording remains the Dartington Piano Trio with Patrick Ireland on viola. That Hyperion Helios budget disc has an autumnal richness, a slightly heavier bow arm, that I still find moving in a different way. The Cappa account is leaner, quicker off the string, more like watercolor than oil. Neither is wrong. I find I want both on the shelf.

The Bax Piano Quartet, in one continuous movement from 1922, is the real discovery for many listeners, and rightly so. It’s dense, chromatically saturated, almost Scriabinesque in its harmonic vertigo at climactic moments, yet it never loses its Celtic loam entirely. Bax always claimed to be more inspired by the west of Ireland than by anything English, and you hear it here in the modal turns that keep surfacing under all that late-Romantic saturation. The performance is terrific: Adam Newman’s viola digs into the inner voices with real bite, and the ensemble is unafraid of the score’s occasional ungainliness. It has been recorded before, not often, and Rob Barnett’s old favorite on Meridian still has partisans, but I’d happily live with this new version as a first choice.

Ian Wilson’s Noct is the wild card, and it earns its place. Thirteen minutes, continuous, with a nocturnal stillness that owes something to late Britten and something to Feldman’s patience, though Wilson’s harmonic language stays rooted enough that the ear never floats free of tonality altogether. It’s the sort of piece that could sound merely atmospheric in lesser hands. Here it doesn’t. There’s structural backbone under the haze, and the reading has the sustained concentration such music demands. Whether it enters the repertoire permanently, who can say — contemporary companion pieces on historical discs rarely do. But it’s no mere makeweight.

Then the Walton — half an hour of astonishing, occasionally exhausting invention from a twenty-something composer not yet sure whether he was an enfant terrible or an English romantic, and therefore, gloriously, both at once. Begun in his teens, revised into his early twenties, it looks backward toward Elgar’s harmonic richness and forward toward the astringencies of the Sinfonia Concertante and the Viola Concerto. The slow movement is where Walton’s melodic gift first shows its full adult power, long-breathed, a little bruised. The Cappa players don’t quite match the visceral attack of Peter Donohoe with the Maggini Quartet on Naxos — that account, budget-priced, remains a genuine contender, and the Nash Ensemble’s Hyperion album, more variously coupled, still has claims on repertoire grounds alone. But the new performance has virtues those lack: a chamber-music intimacy, a willingness to let phrases breathe rather than push them toward the finish line. The finale’s dance rhythms have real lift, real swagger, without turning coarse.

Sound engineering, typical of this label’s work at this venue, is warm, close without being airless. You can hear rosin dust practically settling on the piano lid.

Six recordings of the Walton currently circulate, by my count, and none of them is negligible. This new one won’t unseat Donohoe or the Nash account as first recommendation, but as part of an intelligently assembled, freshly played, adventurously coupled anthology, it deserves a place close by. Recommended, with real warmth, and not merely as a supplement to better-known versions.