Louis Ferdinand: Complete Piano Trios, Vol. 2

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This is the second disc devoted by the Chinese-German Trio Parnassus to the chamber music of Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, the dedicatee of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3. The prince was an aristocratic patron for whom the irascible Beethoven actually had musical respect, noting that he played not "in a princely or royal manner but rather like a competent piano player." Ferdinand, who was killed by Napoleon's troops in 1806, in turn venerated Beethoven, but the strongest tribute to his talent is that as a composer he wrote music that neither aped Beethoven's nor took refuge in Classical models. The neglect of his music in favor of such modest talents as Kozeluch and Pleyel is a little hard to understand. Schumann, another admirer of Ferdinand, got it right when he called him "the Romantic composer of the Classical period." The movements of these two chamber works (actually the second is a piano quartet) fall into the sonata, rondo, minuet, and ternary forms of Mozart. They do not diffuse themselves into large, relaxed shapes as Hummel's do. Instead, they pack intense effusions of melody and thematic elaboration into logical structures. Ferdinand does not tend toward Beethovenian drama but toward the warmer lyricism of Schubert or even Schumann himself. The dark, propulsive finale of the Quartet in F minor, Op. 6, could easily be mistaken for music 50 years later in time. But the high point of this work, and of this whole album, is its Adagio, in which a stately theme atomizes into its component parts and finally dissolves into a piano cadenza in the middle of the movement -- an entirely original and extraordinary expressive device in 1803. The Trio Parnassus, playing modern instruments, enters fully into the spirit of the music with smoothly lyrical melodies and passagework, never overplaying the Romantic aspects -- those stand on their own. The rather spacious acoustic of the riding arena used by the engineers of the MDG label, although it has worked splendidly for recordings of occasional music by Mozart and his contemporaries, somewhat detracts from the music's power in this case, for this is chamber music, not arena music, and its concentrated power would have been enhanced if the music were heard close up. But this is a very minor issue, not distracting the listener from a performance that bears out this trio's claim to have "liberated long-forgotten musical treasures from the archives." For chamber players, this is an absolutely essential purchase.
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