Floridian: Audio files

Audio files

By Times staff

MARTHA ARGERICH; SCHUMANN: PIANO QUINTET; ANDANTE AND VARIATIONS (EMI CLASSICS) -- Few composers have enriched the chamber music repertoire as significantly as Robert Schumann, whose evergreen piano quintet remains as popular today as it was a century ago.

In 1994, pianist Martha Argerich, joined by a select group of colleagues -- all personal friends -- recorded these sumptuous works in an all-Schumann concert at the Concertgebouw in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

In this survey of Schumann, Argerich and company pay glowing tribute to the composer's most celebrated chamber works. Argerich has become something of a cult figure in classical music culture, made all the more palpable by her recent victory over cancer. She is a spectacular virtuoso of the first rank who does not set herself above a collaborative effort. In the lyrical Quintet, her jewel-like sound and liquid phrasing prove ideally suited to the larger, integral task of weaving among the soaring lines and musical precipices of the string players.

Much the same can be said of her ardent performance of the Fantasiestucke for cello and piano. Natalia Gutman equals Argerich's affective intensity in a freely drawn reading that shorts intimacy in favor of bold declamation. Violist Nobuko Imai offers an exceptionally probative view of the tightly constructed, dark-hued Marchenbilder, where Argerich's understatement is most welcome. Of special interest here, and played most persuasively, is the rarely performed Andante and Variations, for two pianos, two cellos and horn.

Argerich, although an admirable pianist, tends to go on musical autopilot, washing over detail. A

-- JOHN BELL YOUNG, Times correspondent

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TRULS MORK AND HAVARD GIMSE; GRIEG: SONATA FOR CELLO AND PIANO (VIRGIN CLASSICS). Think of Grieg, and you think of Norway. There is something about his music that recalls the austere, mountainous terrain that harbors cozy fishing villages and wintry pines. In this latest offering devoted to his music, cellist Truls Mork and pianist Havard Gimse are joined by colleagues in the most riveting performances of this repertoire to come along in decades. The musicians recorded this disc at Troldhaugen, Grieg's home in Norway, using the composer's own piano.

Whatever they're teaching young musicians nowadays in Norway, it's working, and working well. Their spectacular musicianship, united to magisterial technical command, is at once intelligent, impassioned and poetic. Gimse already demonstrated his prowess in an earlier release, on the Naxos label, of Sibelius' piano music. No less impressive is Truls Mork, whose sound is glorious, as if the cello were an orchestra. What a pity this sonata, which Grieg composed in 1883, more than a decade after his celebrated piano concerto, is so seldom played.

Though it brings Brahms' E minor sonata to mind, it is much more ebullient, with its rustic asides and allusions to Scandinavian folk song. The rhythmic tautness of the duo's playing makes sense of its myriad, sometimes disparate, fragments, driving it forward to its luminous conclusion.

In the String Quartet in G minor, composed in 1877, Mork is joined by violinists Solve Sigerland and Alte Sponberg and violist Lars Anders Tomter. It's an ambitious work, with its broad themes, march-like rhythms and volcanic arpeggios. This is a work in search of a much larger instrumentarium, namely, an orchestra. No matter, given how powerfully and pristinely this Norwegian foursome illuminates the work's every demand and compositional turret. The informative liner notes and accompanying booklet are likewise exceptional, offering splendid color photographs of Troldhaugen. A-plus

-- J.B.Y.