Saint-Saens & Chausson: Piano Quartets – Schubert Enesemble | CD, Chandos

The Schubert Ensemble returns with a programme that has been in its repertoire for many years: the piano quartets by Saint-Saëns and Chausson.

It would be hard to find a more vivid demonstration of the variety of French music making in the last quarter of the nineteenth century than these two quartets, and the differences between them are all the more striking in that neither of them conforms wholly to the casual cliché of French music as being light, graceful, charming, and anti anything that might be classed as intellectual.

From Saint-Saëns’s witty and elegant Quartet in B flat major to Chausson’s relatively unknown, rhapsodic, and full-blooded Quartet in A major, the thirty-year old Schubert Ensemble reveals two extremes of the French romantic repertoire and here offers a rare, attractive, and diverse programme.