Charles Koechlin - Piano Quintet; String Quartet No. 3 (Sarah Lavaud; Antigone Quartet)

Information

Composer: Charles Koechlin

• Piano Quintet, Op. 80
• String Quartet No. 3, Op. 72

Sarah Lavaud, piano

Antigone Quartet

Date: 2008

Label: AR RE-SE

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Review

This disc is a perfect demonstration of what treasures might be waiting to be rediscovered among Charles Koechlin's huge and still drastically undervalued output. Both the Piano Quintet and the Third String Quartet were begun during the first world war, and the bulk of work on them was completed soon after hostilities ended; the Quartet was first performed in 1924, but Koechlin continued to revise the Quintet for another 10 years before it received its premiere.

Both works are reactions to the horrors and the carnage of the war, but stylistically they are very different. Most of the Quartet is identifiably and in some ways unremarkably French, with echoes of early Debussy and Fauré especially in the conversational exchanges of the opening movement, a diatonic slow movement and a folksy, uncomplicated finale. But the Scherzo, which is second in the sequence, is something else altogether. With its martial, trumpet-like flourishes and drumrolls, it evokes the same world as the central movement of Debussy's two-piano En Blanc et Noir, composed around the same time, but there's an extra edge of brittle sarcasm to the music that seems to prefigure early Prokofiev and Shostakovich, as well as the French composers of Les Six, several of whom were taught by Koechlin.

The 40-minute Piano Quintet is even more remarkable: it's an attempt to translate the experience of war into abstract instrumental music. The four movements all have descriptive titles – The Obscure Wait of What Shall Be; The Enemy Attack – The Wound; Consoling Nature; Finale – The Joy, and the first two contain some of the most extraordinary music Koechlin ever wrote. The first movement, spectral and glacially slow, verges on atonality at times; the second, a scherzo, brings two very different musical ideas into violent confrontation; there's then a radiant, consoling slow movement and an unbuttoned, celebratory finale, but it's the memory of the first two movements that lingers. Both works are superbly played by the young Antigone Quartet, with Sarah Lavaud joining them for the Piano Quintet. The whole disc is a revelation.

-- Andrew Clements, The Guardian

More reviews:

https://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2013/july13/Koechlin_chamber.htm

https://www.amazon.com/Charles-Koechlin-Quintet-Quartet-Antigone/dp/B01K8M951O

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Charles Koechlin (27 November 1867 – 31 December 1950) was a French composer, teacher and musicologist. Among his teachers at the Paris Conservatoire were Jules Massenet, Gabriel Fauré, Maurice Ravel and Jean Roger-Ducasse. He was a political radical all his life and a passionate enthusiast for such diverse things as medieval music, The Jungle Book of Rudyard Kipling, Johann Sebastian Bach, film stars (especially Lilian Harvey and Ginger Rogers), traveling, stereoscopic photography and socialism. As a composer, Koechlin was enormously prolific, and was highly eclectic in inspiration and technique.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Koechlin

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Sarah Lavaud was trained by Bruno Rigutto, Nicholas Angelich, Christian Ivaldi, Ami Flammer and Michaël Levinas at the CNSM in Paris. She also advice of György Kurtág, Franco Scala and Livia Rev during master-classes. Winner of international competitions, she performs on prestigious French and European stages – alone or in dialogue with partners such as François-René Duchâble, Christian Ivaldi, Svetlin Roussev, Ingrid Schoenlaub and the Quatuor Parisii. Lavaud also devotes herself to teaching through master classes as well as at the Conservatoire d’Asnières, where she was appointed professor in 2015.

https://www.sarahlavaud.com/

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