Kathryn Stott has long been an exponent of Fauré’s music, and a very good one as this lovely performance of the Fourth Nocturne shows. Nor are these versions of the two Piano Quartets ever less than decent–but compared to the recent Harmonia Mundi release of the same works featuring an augmented Trio Wanderer, they simply don’t rise to the same level. First, the engineering, while again clean and natural, is somewhat low-level and far less detailed than the superb HM sonics. This matters in music that packs so much color and harmonic interest in its quieter moments, and that features long paragraphs when all the strings present a unified front against the piano.
Even more problematic, the Hermitage String Trio falls into the same generic “stylishness” that afflicts so many performances of Fauré’s chamber music. Save for the scherzo of the Second quartet, where they really dig in consistently, the playing is unfailingly cultured and elegant but also somewhat bland. One longs for a bit of the Russian soul that the group’s name and ethnicity seem to promise. The two adagios flow sweetly, but without the emotional punch that they should carry, particularly in the First quartet. The finale of the Second quartet waltzes gracefully, but there’s more rhythmic lift in the HM performance than we find here. In short, this is good but not great–and if you can have great, why settle for the merely good?
