La discothèque idéale de Diapason Volume 6 Musique de chambre

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Transported back to Brahms’s time, when he regularly played with the most eminent soloists, beginning with his friend Joachim, would we appreciate their dialogue? Would it be intelligible to us? “We would understand nothing of it, I fear”: Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s answer, despite being a champion of period instruments in Bach and Monteverdi. In fact, a few rolls recorded by Joachim at the end of his life plunge us into another world and remind us that alongside the renewal of compositions comes the more subterranean metamorphosis of instrumental playing styles. The discographic harvest of the 1930s to 1950s is precious in this respect. Brahms and his partners are no more, but a Busch, a Szigeti and many others received their teaching or their advice. Let us not be naive. The temptation is great to hear a “tradition” in Busch’s Brahms cycle for HMV, and yet no one before him played Brahms as he did - if certain choices of tempi or rubatos coincide with the recommendations of Jeno Hubay, his playing was no less marked by his encounter with Schönberg, a new approach to musical analysis, a new kind of “precision” developed in front of the microphones. The density of Busch’s phrasing rests as much on his heritage as on his emancipation: a tension equally fertile in the keyboards of Edwin Fischer, Rubinstein, Horszowski, Primrose’s viola, or Reginald Kell’s clarinet. Let us visit this box set as a grove at the crossroads, between a lost world but not so distant, and the assertion of a modernity, not only technical, embodied in particular by the Budapest Quartet. Seven colleagues lent me a hand for this selection, and they all deserve thanks for having respected the instruction that guides our Ideal Discography volume after volume: listen to everything again. Such a project always risks seeing the selection dominated by one performer or one musical family - we are far from that. Half of the recordings gathered here had disappeared from the catalogue. Collectors will particularly prize the two Clarinet Sonatas by Kell and Horszowski, which are appearing on CD for the first time. Sonata op. 108, the Quartet op. 25 and the Horn Trio, presented twice, have eased some matters of conscience. What a contrast, moreover, between the versions of the Horn Trio recorded with Serkin, in 1933 and 1960! Another “bonus” is the four lieder cited in the violin sonatas, which no recording had yet paired with them. (Gaëtan Naulleau/Magazine Diapason)