RCS, 23/10/2015

Franck : Prelude, Chorale and Fugue
Franck : Piano Quintet

Sinae Lee, piano
Andrea Gajic, violin
Justine Watts, violin
Andrew Berridge, viola
Alison Wells, cello

This concert was to mark the 125th anniversary of César Franck's death, with the core participation of Sinae Lee, who is on the faculty of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.  The primary work was the sombre and smoulderingly passionate Piano Quintet, but to precede it, Lee chose a slightly later work, though no less intense, the Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, an imposing piece of around 18 minutes, nominally in three movements, as the title suggests, but with each part so tightly interknit by Franck's cyclic themes that it reads as a single-movement fantasy of quite unorthodox format.  Certainly the Fugue is only just barely recognisable as such, and Franck, for all his admiration of Bach and the art of counterpoint, does not insist strongly on pure form, preferring to bend it to suit his own needs.  Like most of Franck's keyboard works, it is technically very demanding, but the technique is wholly subservient to the musical ideas.

Lee is, apparently, something of a specialist of this kind of highly demanding repertory.  I found the sound of the Stevenson Hall Steinway a little brittle for my liking, but she easily demonstrated a broad range of dynamics, very important in giving colour to the music, and good, clean pedalling, vital for clarity.  It was not a flawless reading, but it was absorbing, the interplay of the voices well-handled, if not always as sharply delineated as would have been ideal.

The Piano Quintet is a sorely undervalued work, one of the masterpieces of this format, yet too rarely performed, presumably because of the technical demands it makes on all the players.  It is, perhaps, the first major work of his late period, brooding, tempestuous, again using a cyclical form that brings back the thematic material of the first movement to close off the work, and the themes themselves, throughout the piece, are clearly related.  For this piece, Lee became relatively discreet, emerging from the group when required, but otherwise providing a sure bedrock from which to permit the quartet to play out their parts.  In the programme note provided, Lee admitted that neither she nor any of her colleagues had performed the Quintet before their rehearsals, and sometimes there were some fluctuations in tempo that indicated they hadn't quite found their ideal path through the music.  On the whole, however, this was a very good performance, delivered with clear commitment and enjoyment.

[Next : 24th October]