Quatuor Terpsycordes & Fabrizio Chiovetta - Frank Martin: Piano Quintet, Quartet, Pavane couleur du temps (2024)

Chamber music meanders throughout Frank Martin’s career in a multitude of different ensembles and titles, ranging from the classical to the more unexpected, such as the Rhapsodie for string quintet with double bass, the Sonata da chiesa for viola d’amore and organ, the Ballade for trombone and piano or the Petite fanfare for brass sextet. Within this abundance, the composer approached only sparingly the most historically established genres. His only string quartet is a late work, his last chamber music piece. On the contrary, the Quintet for piano and strings and the Pavane couleur du temps are among his earliest contributions in this field.

At the end of 1918, Martin married Odette Micheli, and the young couple moved to Zurich. The Quintet for piano and strings was composed in this city a few months later. The work belongs to a period during which the composer’s style gradually freed itself from post-romanticism and became more personal. Martin’s recent meeting with Ernest Ansermet coincided with a marked interest in the music of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, of whom the conductor was a strong advocate. The Quintet bears witness to this influence but goes far beyond it. An unusual conception of this musical genre can already be heard in the very first bars. Over a sorrowful accompaniment by the violins and viola, the cello introduces a plaintive, passionate melody. It is not until the sixteenth bar that the piano makes a timid appearance. With only a few exceptions, the piano remains in the background throughout the piece, confining itself to providing colour or rhythmic support. This is a far cry from the piano quintet tradition, which, from Johannes Brahms to Gabriel Fauré and César Franck, has placed the keyboard on an equal footing with the strings. It is in the minuet that the spirit of Ravel is most explicitly found: the dance is highly stylised here, and both the rhythmic momentum and certain pizzicato and arpeggiated chord effects recall the world of the French composer.

It is often said that the Quintet’s slow movement recalls Frank Martin’s fascination for Johann Sebastian Bach. Admittedly, the haunting triplets that open the piece would not be out of place in a Passion written by the German master, but the analogy doesn’t go much beyond that. The composer creates a perfect sense of chiaroscuro between this sombre accompaniment and the luminous arpeggios of the first violin and the viola. A post-romantic tone is heard here, culminating in the central section where the first violin’s playing in sixths and thirds contributes to a polyphony of exacerbated lyricism while the piano remains silent. The strings alone again play the nearly first sixty bars of the finale. The last movement alternates between fugal writing and more transparent passages, with the composer constantly varying the instrumental textures with much ingenuity. Amid this fireworks display, a popular Savoy melody can even be heard.

The Pavane couleur du temps was written for a string quintet in 1920 and then arranged for a small orchestra in 1954. It takes its name from Charles Perrault’s fairy tale Peau d’âne (Donkeyskin), in which a princess, seeking to avoid a dreaded marriage, tests her future and undesirable husband by requesting a gown “the colour of the sky”. Both the title and the reference to Perrault associate the piece with Ravel, who opened Ma Mère l’Oye with the Pavane de la Belle au Bois dormant inspired by the same author. The pavane, a court dance that originated in Italy in the 16th century, came back into fashion at the end of the 19th century thanks to composers such as Camille Saint-Saëns, Ralph Vaughan Williams and, of course, Ravel. Martin’s score has a noblesse and a melodic contour similar to his colleague’s but adds a faster, more tormented middle section. It is a perfect illustration of the French influences to which Martin was then receptive.

Despite Martin’s mastery of string writing in his Quintet for Piano and Strings, he waited until the end of his life to finally devote himself to the string quartet, the supreme chamber music genre. It even took a commission from the Pro Helvetia Foundation for his only quartet to see the light of day in 1967. This mature work opens up a very different world from the other two pieces in this recording. It reveals a language that is as far removed from post-romanticism as from the French aesthetic of the turn of the century, a highly personal form of neo-classicism magnified by a soberly intense expressivity.

As from the first bars, a highly original way of building the dialogue between the instruments is displayed. The initial Lento opens with an extended viola solo, soon taken up in unison with the first violin. A contrasting theme is added on the second violin, with the cello’s pizzicatos in the background. This conversation continues until the cello introduces a new motif, which the other partners comment in turn. The movement is, therefore, not built on the principle of exposition and development but on that of a constant counterpoint fed by several thematic ideas. The dramaturgy of the brief scherzo is based on the opposition between the incessant restlessness of a string of quavers punctuated by unpredictable sighs and the emergence of fleeting melodic elements. Given its nobility, its metre, and the rhythm and tone of its principal theme, the slow movement is a pavane that does not speak its name. Finally, the composer revealed (in À propos de… Commentaires de Frank Martin sur ses oeuvres, published by Maria Martin, 1984) the extra-musical inspiration for the finale: “One night, during a stay in Graz, I dreamt that I saw half-human figures dancing while rising into the air and I knew, in my dream, that this aerial dance was to be the finale of my quartet. Rightly or wrongly, I let myself be guided by this dream and endeavoured to give it a sort of musical equivalence.” The 6/8 metre gives these pages a dancing impulse in a rising line towards the treble. It is with this elfin jig that Frank Martin bid farewell to chamber music.