Bloch - (2) Piano Quintets

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This CD is pure musical euphoria! I long have cherished and loved Ernest Bloch's First Piano Quintet. For years I have wanted to hear the Second Piano Quintet, which went unrecorded commercially for decades on end, but finally it, too, has appeared on CD in a number of performances. I have had a printed edition of the second quintet in my personal collection for many years, and studied the printed score, trying out the music at times on the piano, but always had difficulty really coming to grips adequately with this work in that way. Alas, I never was able even to find an opportunity to play (as 'cellist) the second quintet with musical friends, even though I have had the printed parts along with the score of it, due to the music's level of difficulty, beyond what one can expect of amateur chamber music adepts. Well, the second quintet, about half the length in playing time as the first of Bloch's piano quintets, turns out indeed to be a masterpiece in its own right, but it nonetheless is the performance of the first quintet, musically superior to the later work, that makes this new recording even more a "must" to acquire.

The Kocian Quartet with Ivan Klànsky as pianist just possibly may play the First Quintet as well and powerfully as the Fine Arts Quartet with Frank Glazer did on a venerable Concert-Disc (issue no. 252) LP recording that I came close to wearing out from listening to it over a long expanse of time, although, alas, I cannot access my copy, to make a spot-on comparison, at present, after the disruption of my post-retirement move. Even if the Klànsky-Kocian performance very likely is as good, or perhaps even superior, the earlier Glazer-Fine Arts recording, a now pioneeringly historic one for this work, should be reissued, most ideally coupled with with the Fine Arts Quartet's exceedingly fine recording of Bloch's Fifth String Quartet (that quartet, as the Fine Arts Quartet recorded it, once available on LP as Concert-Disc 1225 in mono, 225 in stereo, then later, still on LP, as Everest 3328); the recordings by the Griller String Quartet, so closely associated with the composer, of Bloch's preceding four string quartets are avaiable on a fine Decca (U.K.) double-CD reissue in its "Original Masters" series (474-6021-D-C-2), but, alas, the Griller String Quartet did not survive collectively to record Bloch's fifth and last quartet. Of the currently available recordings of the fifth quartet, all are very inferior to that of the Fine Arts Quartet, a group whose recorded legacy needs to resurface further than it has to date on CD (though a revival of interest in this group seems to be gathering force) not only for its recorded performances of Bloch's chamber works, but for its supremely fine recordings of all of Mendelssohn-Bartholdy's music for string quartet music and for numerous cherishable recordings of works by Hindemith and by many other composers.

The Klànsky-Kocian performances of both of Bloch's quintets for piano and strings constitute a recording to treasure. It is not often that currently active string quartet formations can rise to the sheer level of exultant, effulgent, large-scale expressivity that these works require. Klànsky and the Kocian Quartet do just that, to rapturous effect. What sublimely exciting, propulsive, moving, truly inebriating music these quintets are, especially the first of them! The second quintet, compared to the first, is a more prickly and rather more abrasively modernistic work (but with some ravishingly beautiful writing in the second movement and in the latter part of the third), even more expressionist in hue than the relatively more romantically spirited (but still quite harmonically tangy for its time) music of the first quintet. The vivid sonics of the Praga Digitals recording (PRO-250-185) are a big plus in such richly textured music, too. Get this one!

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