From British label Metronome comes an attractive series entitled “Music and Art”, with a range of paintings from the UK’s National Gallery collections reproduced on the booklet covers. This disc, from the ensemble Juno’s Band, offers new accounts of Fauré’s first piano quartet and Ravel’s piano trio. In the former, it’s a Fauré of striding ambition, not diffident sentimentality who emerges, and nothing you’ll hear in my favorite account of Op. 15 from Pascal Rogé and the Ysaÿe Quartet on Decca suggests otherwise. This new version from Juno’s Band fails to convey the same sense of epic grandeur, though the players creditably evince the shifting moods and fleeting visions of the work and give a beautifully inflected reading of the Adagio, with Ian Brown’s piano contributions a model of restraint.
In general, the playing never matches the sonorous depth of the Quatuor Ysaÿe, and Brown isn’t quite in the class of Rogé, whose more cultured pianism manages to draw out the music’s deeper undertow without diminishing its scale. Juno’s Band seems closer in spirit to the more lightweight ASV performance from the Schubert Ensemble of London, but I can’t help concluding that Fauré intended to convey altogether darker emotions than either would suggest. Juno’s Band also gives a forthright reading of Ravel’s piano trio, which doesn’t avoid technical pitfalls in the difficult second movement (Pantoum) and finale. It’s a mediocre performance, never seriously challenging the definitive Ravel-Chausson coupling from the Beaux Arts Trio on Philips.
