Jeux dété: French Wind Quintets by The Galliard Ensemble

Wind quintets have a way of exposing everything. There’s no string cushion, no pedal to blur the seams — five solo voices, each with its own timbre and temperament, obliged to breathe together or fall apart. The French have always understood this instinctively, going back to the Paris Conservatoire’s obsession with instrumental color as a subject unto itself, not just a means to an end. This new disc from the Galliard Ensemble understands it too, and plays like a group that argued over articulation in a rehearsal room somewhere in London, not one that sight-read for a microphone.

Start with the Taffanel, because everyone else will start with it last, as a curiosity. It shouldn’t be treated that way. Written in 1878 by the man who essentially invented the modern French flute school — his fingerprints are on Debussy’s Syrinx, several generations removed — this quintet still surprises with its harmonic restlessness. My ear keeps snagging on passages that seem to look forward to Strauss’s tone poems, still a decade or more away. The Andante is the weak link structurally. That horn solo in its low register is a lovely idea poorly supported, and the afterbeats in the other voices land with an audible thud, more plotzy than plush. But the Vivace redeems everything — a tarantella that keeps threatening to spin out of control and never quite does, which is exactly the right kind of tension.

Milhaud’s La cheminée du roi René gets a performance of real discipline here. This suite began life as film music, for Cavalcade d’amour in 1939, and film scores reduced to chamber forces can sound thin, apologetic, embarrassed by their own former grandiosity. Not this one. Milhaud’s polytonal seasoning — that faint sourness under the sweetness, never quite resolving where you expect — keeps even the jauntiest movements, like the hunting-horn romp of “Chasse à Valabre,” from tipping into mere decoration. The Galliard’s oboist deserves particular mention for the sly, almost wry inflection she brings to the melodic lines. Nothing is played completely straight, which is as it should be with Milhaud, a composer incapable of writing an entirely unclouded major triad.

Françaix, on the other hand, wants nothing but clouds parting. His First Quintet, from 1948, is one of those scores that could seem lightweight in lesser hands. Françaix always ran the risk of writing wallpaper, elegant wallpaper, but wallpaper nonetheless. Not here. The opening Allegro assai has real snap, a carnival barker’s energy, and the Presto scherzo goes by in a blur of synchronized tonguing that must have taken hours to get this clean. The closing Tempo di marcia francese struts without smirking. This interpretation argues, rightly, for the piece’s substance rather than its charm alone, though there is plenty of charm too.

The two shorter works are pure confection, and none the worse for it. Pierné’s Pastorale, op. 14, no. 1, gives the oboe its moment in the pastoral sun — that 6/8 lilt, the countrified drone underneath — and it’s dispatched with unforced grace. Bozza’s Scherzo, op. 48, was the disc’s small revelation for me: I’d filed Bozza away mentally as a saxophone-quartet composer, having first encountered him decades ago in exactly that guise, and this Mendelssohnian sparkle caught me off guard. Two minutes and forty-one seconds of pure delight, tossed off with the kind of ensemble unanimity that separates good quintets from great ones.

Comparisons? The old Melos Ensemble recordings from the 1960s have more tonal weight, especially in the Milhaud, but less wit. The Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet’s version of the Françaix is famous, deservedly, for its polish, though the Galliard’s reading has more mischief in it, less Teutonic tidiness. This new disc doesn’t unseat either, quite — but it belongs on the same shelf, and for the Taffanel alone, which nobody else has recorded with this much conviction, it’s worth acquiring. The engineers balance the ensemble well, letting each instrument keep its own voice without losing the blend. Recommended to anyone who thinks chamber music for winds is a lesser cousin to the string quartet. It isn’t. This disc proves it.