Elgar and Dvořák Piano Quintets – Ledger

There is something almost willfully unfashionable about pairing these two quintets, and something exactly right about it too. Elgar and Dvořák never met, so far as anyone knows, though Elgar conducted Dvořák’s music admiringly and the Bohemian’s harmonic fingerprints are all over the English composer’s chamber works of the 1900s and after. Put the two piano quintets side by side and you hear two very different men groping toward the same problem: how to make a keyboard and four strings sound like one organism rather than a piano with an entourage.

Philip Ledger, better known to most listeners as a choral maestro (his years at King’s College, Cambridge, still cast a long shadow), turns out to have been a pianist of real sensitivity, and a chamber musician of unusual tact. That word matters here. Tact. He does not grab the wheel. In the Elgar, op. 84, written at Brinkwells in that strange, grief-soaked autumn of 1918 when the composer was hearing, in his own words, “ghostly stuff” in the wind through the trees, Ledger and the Alberni Quartet resist every temptation to over-inflect. The first movement is a thicket of thematic material, really four ideas competing and eventually reconciling, and lesser performers tend to sell each one as if it were the last melody they would ever get to play. Not this group. There’s a first theme, craggy and unsentimental, around 1:22; a second, weaker-kneed idea shortly after that seems aware of its own fragility; a third at 3:05 that has a whiff of the drawing room about it but plays it straighter than most; and finally, five minutes in, the theme that opened the work in shadowy fragments now stands revealed, fully lit. Ledger understands architecture. You don’t run King’s College Choir for thirteen years without learning something about how sound accumulates in space.

I wish, though, that the engineers had given him a more generous space to work in. The acoustic here is dry, clinically so in the loudest pages of the development, where Elgar wants a kind of orchestral surge and the recording gives us something closer to a well-lit seminar room. Compare the 1985 Meridian disc with the Medici Quartet and John Bingham, which I went back to after hearing this disc. Bingham dramatizes more. His phrasing lingers, sometimes too long, and the Medici’s account of that second theme is almost indecently curvaceous. It’s a hammier reading in places, the third theme practically dripping syrup. But the ampler acoustic pays real dividends in the climaxes, and Bingham’s fourth theme has a radiance that Ledger, worthy as he is, doesn’t quite match. Both have virtues. Neither is definitive. Is anything, in this work?

The slow movement is where Ledger’s version earns its keep. Elgar marked it Adagio; here it emerges as something gentler, an Adagietto really, clocking in at just over eleven minutes rather than the more spacious thirteen or fourteen some versions take. I had my doubts going in. Surely a movement this elegiac needs room to breathe? But the tempo choice clarifies rather than rushes. You can hear, with unusual precision, how one instrumental line hands off to the next in that long opening melody, cello to viola to first violin and back, each entry perfectly weighted. The contrasting episode, not really a second theme so much as a rumination, begins with the piano’s rising four-note figure, answered by the strings falling away in response, before the first violin pushes forward with something more solemn, almost hymnlike. When the opening idea returns in the development it’s gnarled, knottier than before, working through some private argument, and then it breaks into transformation: passionate, unguarded, the closest Elgar comes here to actual heat. By the recapitulation the theme has found its resolution: calmer, sunnier, quietly triumphant, like sun after English rain, which is a cliché I’ll allow myself because it’s exactly what the music does.

The Dvořák coupling is generous and apt rather than an afterthought. His op. 81 quintet, from 1887, is sunnier terrain altogether: Bohemian dumka rhythms, that unmistakable major-minor ambiguity Dvořák could turn on a dime, folk material dignified without being embalmed. Ledger and the Albernis play it with evident affection, though I’d stop short of calling this account a top recommendation against the classic versions — the old Curzon/Vienna Octet-derived readings, or more recently the Richter/Borodin rendition, which for all its idiosyncrasy has an unmatched improvisatory freedom in the dumka movement. What Ledger brings instead is consistency of style across both discs: the same unforced musicianship, the same refusal to oversell a phrase.

Elgar himself, notoriously self-critical and prone to depressive spells, thought this quintet among his best chamber works, and late in life it was the piece he wanted played at his memorial. Reticence amid the emotion — that’s the Elgar idiom precisely, and it takes performers of genuine restraint to find it rather than paper over it with vibrato and rubato. Ledger and the Albernis have that restraint. Whether they have quite enough voltage for the big moments is a fair question, and the recorded sound doesn’t help their cause. But as a document of intelligent, unmannered music-making, and as a late contribution from a musician whose reputation rested elsewhere, this disc deserves a place on the shelf, even if not the only place.