(+++) WITH A FRENCH ACCENT

Franck: Piano Quintet; Frank Bridge: Piano Quintet. Apple Hill String Quartet (Elise Kuder and Jesse MacDonald, violins; Mike Kelley, viola; Jacob MacKay, cello); Sally Pinkas, piano. MSR Classics. $14.95.

Michel Merlet: Chamber  Music for Flute, Cello and Piano. Leslie Neighbor Stroud, flute; Peter Zay, cello; Matthew Odell, piano. MSR Classics. $14.95.

     There were considerable differences among the French, German and Italian styles during the Baroque era, although not all of them are readily apparent to modern ears. The differences persisted for centuries, sometimes in notable ways: for example, as opera developed, German style tended to emphasize the orchestra, Italian the voice, and French a fairly equal partnership between the two. The stylistic distinctions, often subtle, inform the basic sound of a wide variety of works, and some continue to be audible even today. Certainly César Franck’s 1879 F minor Piano Quintet (at whose première the piano was played by Saint-Saëns) has emotional and textural underpinnings that mark it as a French work. It is intense and turbulent from its first bars, using two much-repeated four-bar phrases as structural building blocks and proceeding throughout its three movements with sensitivity and sometimes contradictory feelings: the finale is marked Allegro non troppo ma con fuoco, a somewhat puzzling indication that the performers on an MSR Classics release seem to have internalized particularly well. Written late in Franck’s life, the quintet is not a summary of experience but an ardent exploration of the emotional world that the composer visited frequently. The work contrasts interestingly, if not perhaps in a fully satisfying way, with the Piano Quintet of Frank Bridge, a work of a later time period (1905/1912) that is also in a minor key (D minor) but that dates to its composer’s earlier years. British music found its own direction in the 20^th century, but this Bridge quintet has some sensibilities in common with Franck’s in its expressiveness, its front-weighting (the first movement is the longest in both pieces), and its considerable lyricism – especially, and to an almost overdone degree, in the central Adagio ma non troppo, a fusing of two movements from the work’s original four-movement version. Sally Pinkas and the Apple Hill String Quartet approach the Bridge with engagement and much the same intensity they bring to the Franck, thus displaying the works in ways that give them more parallelisms than the music, at face value, actually possesses. The gracefulness of the Bridge does owe something to French sensibilities – Bridge had studied various European composers and absorbed elements from many of them – and if the work does not quite have its own voice, it at least speaks with eloquence in the ones Bridge had learned.

     By the later 20^th century, French music tended to have more of an international flavor than it possessed earlier, but its poise and precision continued to owe something to history. Another MSR Classics release shows this in chamber music for flute, cello and piano by Michel Merlet (born 1939). Merlet has written a significant number of works and won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1966, but his music is not especially well-known and not often recorded: of the seven pieces on this CD, five are world première recordings. The works were composed over a three-decade time frame, 1966 to 1995, but all share a similar sense of balance between or among instruments and a commitment to compositional techniques and sounds of the mid-to-late 20^th century. There is one piece for solo flute, Le roque de sol-ut-ré (1995), whose three movements showcase Merlet’s interest in Bach (a consistent element of his style) while also displaying his determination to interpret movements called Prélude, Passacaille and Fugue in ways commensurate with modern sensibilities – including unusual performance techniques and eliciting surprising percussive sounds from the flute. The flute appears with piano in three works: En tous sens… (1966, spelled with ellipsis), Sonatine (1968), and Chacone (1970). The rather dark meandering of the first of these is engaging; the second, in three movements, seems to bend over backwards to assert its dissonant bona fides; the third uses Bach as a jumping-off point and jumps a rather considerable distance. Also here are two works for cello and piano: Une soirée à Nohant (1980) and Prélude–Interlude–Postlude (1992). The first, labeled Élégie, is warm enough and delves into a degree of lyricism, although it is something short of elegiac; the second is explicitly tied to Bach – its opening comes directly from his works – and contrasts the two instruments in intriguing ways, keeping them separate until the concluding movement. The longest piece on the CD is a four-movement Trio for flute, cello and piano, dating to 1983 and neatly encapsulating Merlet’s varying interests in Bach’s music, in contemporary sounds and performance practices, and in combinatorial musical aesthetics. Although not the most-recent work on the disc, it functions as a kind of summation of the elements of the other six, all of which are played with dedication and style by the three very accomplished performers. Elements of Merlet’s music draw on distinctly French sensibilities – notably in some of the ways he employs the flute – while other material is much more of its time and much less of Merlet’s nationality and geography. The music will appeal mostly to people who enjoy works of the time period in which these pieces were written: there is certainly skill in evidence throughout the works, if not perhaps any particular interest in breaking free from conventions of a specific time period and trying to forge new and distinctive musical impressions.