Cross your heart! Do you know the chamber and piano music of Félicien David (1810–1876)? No worries. David was, indeed, one of the most reputable French composers of his time. This was due, most notably, to his numerous compositions and his enthusiasm for the utopian political and social movement of Saint-Simonism, as well as to the opéras comiques La perle de Brésil and Lalla-Roukh that had a remarkable influence on nineteenth-century French opera. Despite all of this, his music is hardly heard today. As with the music of so many other French composers of this period David's oeuvre is doomed to a shadowy existence, and most of his piano and chamber music still awaits proper exploration. If anything does come to mind, one may recall his ‘ode-symphony’ of 1844, Le désert for speaker, tenor, chorus and orchestra, which strongly influenced an entire generation of nineteenth-century composers including Verdi and Bizet – a magnificent musical example of the pronounced enthusiasm for ‘Oriental subjects’. The work was written 10 years after the composer travelled eastwards and experienced the ‘wondrous things’ of Egypt and the Holy Land.

Yet David is surely not the first to come to mind nowadays when thinking of French nineteenth-century chamber and piano music. This is less the fault of the quality of the music per se but rather a result of the quite dreary international concert and recording industry of the semper Idem as well as of the still largely prevalent concept of music historiography that by and large explores music and its history as a ‘master narrative’. Already, a few metres off the well-worn path of the overhyped and overrated ‘masters’, an amazing amount of truly great music can be discovered: the CDs – consisting of world-premiere recordings played in the best of taste, beautifully balanced in charm, delicacy of details and sentiment – by the French label Laborie (which also enjoys a reputation among friends of contemporary jazz) are striking examples in this context. The first recording presents a selection of David's light-hearted string quintets Les quatre saisons for two violins, viola, violoncello and double bass. The extension with a double bass gives the music a singular and enthralling richness of timbre resulting in a luscious and warm sound, further intensified by the tuning pitch of A=435 Hz, following the custom of the time as introduced into law by the French government on 16 February 1859.

The quintets were composed between 1845 and 1846 and were first performed publicly between January and March 1857. The 24 quintets – for each season six short musical soirées – owe their existence less to Vivaldi's The Four Seasons than to David's friendship with the most renowned chamber musicians of his time, including the brothers Charles and Léopold Dancla, Jules Armingaud, the brothers Théophile and Alexandre Tilmant, as well as Georges Onslow. The quintets were quite popular throughout the nineteenth century, thanks to an edition produced by the publisher Schott, which made the works available throughout Europe. Unfortunately, the present recording of the work performed on historic musical instruments (all with gut strings) by members of the Limoges Baroque Ensemble offers only half of the movements of each musical season. Random as the selection may seem at first glance, it proves to be musically convincing and intellectually inspiring. The transparent formal strategies and the melodic richness identify the quintets of David as evidence of a still undamaged popular music culture that was primarily supported by amateurs and music lovers who enjoyed the performance of music among themselves with instruments of their choosing. The ambience of the modern concert hall and the corresponding rituals are foreign to this music, although this could lead to the unjust assumption that we are dealing with light-footed, undemanding music. Just take, for instance, the sixth ‘soirée d'hiver’ or the witty last movement of the autumn series, and you surely will reconsider some of your judgements. Generally, the five proficient musicians manage the paradoxical task of presenting the music of a largely defunct music culture according to today's high demands of musical professionalism without simultaneously altering the character of the music by such expectations. They supply a stunning musical tour de force: incredibly charming and absolutely worth listening to attentively!

In contrast the second recording, entitled Le souvenir, after David's composition for violoncello and piano of the same name, displays a kaleidoscope of delightful piano and chamber music, including some charming piano music as well as the first Trio for Piano, Violin and Violoncello in E-flat Major (1857) and the third String Quartet in D Minor (1868). The recording also incorporates chamber music arrangements (by Henri Vieuxtemps, Philippe Musard and Sebastian Lee) of David's operatic works Lalla-Roukh and Herculaneum and the above-mentioned ode-symphony Le désert. Whereas the first trio (performed by Jean-Jacques Dünki, piano; Andrés Gabetta, violin; and Christophe Coin, violoncello) and the third string quartet (interpreted by the Quatuor Mosaïque) present music of the finest quality, meeting the highest standards of performance, the arrangements are less appealing in compositional terms. Compared to their originals they tend slightly toward superficial sentimentality, most strikingly in the case of Sebastian Lee's mellow but not really ambitious arrangement of the ‘highlights’ of David's Herculaneum for violoncello and piano. David's original romances and mélodies for piano and piano/cello duo, on the other hand, reveal again the stunning freshness of the composer's melodic inspiration and his extraordinary sensibility for harmony and instrumentation. This solo and duo music is a clear manifestation of David's deep anchorage in the nineteenth-century culture of ‘intimate/lyrical music’ – amalgamating the musical spheres of waltz and salon music with some ‘oriental perfume’ and the graceful and sublime sound known from so many of Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn's Lieder ohne Worte.

It is hardly necessary to emphasize that the benefits of such ‘music-archaeological’ efforts can hardly be overstated, particularly when both the music and the performance are of remarkable and exciting qualities as in the present case. The two CDs remind us that among the most predominant tasks of musicians and music historians is not only to preserve the memory of the ‘great deeds’, as Herodotus claimed, but also, as Peter Burke has put it, to be the ‘guardians of the skeletons in the cupboard of the social memory, the “anomalies” … which reveal weaknesses in grand and not-so-grand histories’.Footnote ¹ These recordings illuminate the diversity of nineteenth-century art music and thus not only invite us to reconsider the status quo of today's classical concert and music market, but also give expression to the excitement and pleasure that moving beyond overly static and sometimes seemingly secure boundaries is able to produce.