With the exception of some early works by Franck and Saint-Saëns, and perhaps some obscure ones by Chopin, French chamber music from the first three quarters of the nineteenth century remains terra incognita for many music lovers, performers and even professional musicologists. Nonetheless, as ensembles look farther afield for fresh repertoire, and as record labels seek out novel offerings, an expanding corpus of recordings invites us to explore. One of the braver recent offerings comes from the French label Laborie: a collection of works in various genres, surveying a 40-year swath of the career of the composer, pianist and organ virtuoso Alexandre Pierre François Boëly. These include the hefty String Trio op. 5, no. 2 (1808), the First String Quartet op. 27 (c. 1827), an early quartet movement (c. 1804) and an arrangement for string sextet (with double bass) of an otherwise lost symphony. Interspersed with these are the Trois mélodies pour le violoncelle avec accompagnement d’orgue expressif, newly discovered arrangements from the composer’s 24 Pièces pour l’orgue, op.12, published in 1842. (Or did Boëly rework the mélodies to make the organ pieces?) Featured are two period-instrument ensembles, the Quatour Mosaïques and Ensemble baroque de Limoges, and organist Eric Lebrun. Christophe Coin, the cellist for both groups and the soloist for the Trois mélodies, acts as the common thread.

Written by a composer born the year before Weber, this music will strike many listeners as old fashioned. It owes an obvious debt to the Viennese classical triumvirate, especially Haydn, with the line emphatically drawn at the end of Beethoven’s early period. Those unbothered by Boëly’s entrenchment in the eighteenth century may still find his music perplexing. The problem is that it sounds so much like Haydn in some ways that we expect it to behave like Haydn in other ways, too. Boëly, for instance, favours short phrases and frequent cadences (a characteristic most pronounced in the second mélodie, where a cadence punctuates virtually every four-bar span). In Haydn, of course, cadences help establish hierarchy and formal shape: an antecedent concluding in a half cadence (on V) pairs with a consequent ending in a stronger, authentic cadence (V–I) to create an eight-bar, end-oriented structure. The first-movement main theme of Boëly’s Trio, by contrast, features three equally emphatic authentic cadences (the first occurs on what turns out to be the dominant, but it does not sound like a half cadence due to Boëly’s cursory treatment of the tonic chord at the outset). The theme thereby attenuates the teleology characteristic of the high classical style and pursues an additive approach more characteristic of a Frescobaldi toccata than a taut Viennese sonata form.

If one doesn’t dismiss Boëly as an epigone, it would therefore seem easy to write him off as a poor study of Haydn. But a more sympathetic, and perhaps more rewarding, posture would grant first that Boëly’s music simply organizes time in a less urgently teleological (more French?) manner, and second that it is ‘performers’ music’, which places a greater burden for establishing formal shape upon the musicians bringing the scores to life.

Therein lies the great challenge for interpreters. Let it be said that all of the performances in this collection are in many ways magnificent, featuring largely unblemished intonation, delicate nuances of timbre, crisp rhythmic accuracy and exemplary ensemble playing. The Mosaïques and Limoges ensembles bring a compelling rhythmic effervescence to fast movements and draw bountiful affect from slow ones. Nonetheless, neither group quite takes the reins in the way Boëly’s music demands. Both default to creating pristine, even perfect, measures or pairs of measures, taking with contour and nuance of colour the extreme care of an artisan crafting exquisite porcelain miniatures. But these largely lack contrast, resulting in a problematic sameness which manifests itself in two ways. At the level of the phrase, the lack of differentiation makes for little sense of direction towards a destination. Second, the lack of dynamic contrast yields a series of regular, finely controlled ripples, which do not vary in intensity or grow to become waves. After listening to a few dozen measures of any given movement, I found myself beginning to feel adrift in a vast sea of equal, and equally beautiful, fragments. To be sure, these recordings evince master craftsmanship, but for Boëly’s music to realize its full potential, performers must assume, in a word, more authority over it.

A lavishly illustrated 24-page companion booklet (available online and only in French) offers a wealth of context, most of it related to the Trois mélodies, the most diminutive (and probably the least interesting) item. Readers will learn about the work’s discovery and the sort of orgue expressif for which it was apparently intended. They will also encounter an extravagant five pages about the dedicatee, the Marquis de Corberon (Daniel-Jean-Charles, not Aimé-Alphonse-Charles, as we might suppose), replete with genealogical details of the Bourrée de Corberon family. Despite its heft, the booklet contains disappointingly little on the repertoire. Brigitte François-Sappey’s programme note reads like a miniature life-and-chamber-works biography, and an informative one at that, but it places so little focus on any specific work that it could be repurposed for another Boëly CD with only light editing.

The Italian ensemble Voces Intimae have followed up critically acclaimed, period-instrument recordings of piano trios by Schumann, Hummel, Schubert and Mendelssohn with a two-CD set featuring Théodore Gouvy’s (1819–98) Second, Third, and Fourth Trios (of the five he wrote between 1853–63). Few listeners will place these trios on par with Schumann’s, but there is plenty to like about them. Gouvy shows a flair for the dramatic. The Second Trio, for example, begins in medias res, with an impatient cello theme sounding over stormy piano figuration where inner-voice D♯s needle the A-minor tonic triad. Drawn-out and loaded-up dominants abound, as do sudden shifts in mode, pregnant pauses and sharp contrasts of mood. Gouvy brings an especially fine touch to harmony and tonality. The Sturm und Drang transition in the same movement, for instance, sets up the minor dominant before surprisingly (and delightfully) slipping into the flat submediant for a sweetly introspective, Mendelssohn-like subordinate theme. (The ‘promised’ dominant, however, never materializes, as it would in, say, Brahms). The finale’s coda strikingly romps its way through a full ‘octatonic’ cycle of minor thirds. Gouvy’s large-scale forms do not lead listeners on wild adventures, but they do seem well worked out, and they usually unfold at a carefully measured pace. Each movement in the conventional four-movement cycles possesses a finely etched character, vouchsafed in part by distinctive themes and varied textures.

Gouvy’s limitations as a composer surface perhaps most prevalently in his treatment of the piano. Each trio contains fine writing, but frequently the instrument repeats the same figuration for many – even dozens of – consecutive measures, typically emphasizing regular subdivisions of the beat. Although Gouvy shifts between quavers and semiquavers, and between simple and compound groupings, the figuration results in a baroque-like animation of the pulse that can become overbearing. (On the other hand, when it suddenly crashes to a halt, the aforementioned pauses become all the more pregnant.)

The Second and Third Trios have been previously featured on a very fine 1998 recording by the Münchner Klaviertrio.Footnote ¹ Voces Intimae’s renditions, however, sound materially different, in part on account of the ‘period’ instruments the players deploy in order to ‘restore the music to the purity of its original form, and to realize the true intentions of the composer’.Footnote ² To this end, violinist Luigi De Filippi plays a 1648 Mariani and cellist Sandro Meo wields a copy of a c. 1700 instrument of an unspecified maker, both strung with gut. It might seem a stretch to call these instruments ‘authentic’ to mid-nineteenth-century French chamber music, but one cannot argue with the piano, an 1848 Pleyel, easily the most distinctive aspect of this recording’s sound world, with its rapid decay and slightly twangy timbre but with plenty of depth and power in the bass (which Gouvy deploys liberally, and perhaps excessively).

The members of Voces Intimae deserve hearty congratulations for their consistently excellent musicianship, which showcases admirable accuracy and sure intonation. Both string players bring a refreshing restraint to vibrato. The trio crafts delicately shaped and appealingly understated phrases, yet they are not afraid to lean into sforzandos or unleash a full-on fortissimo. Rubato is used subtly and sparingly, even in slow movements (unlikely the true intention of the composer), but the players do finesse the tempo to fine effect. To stick with a familiar example, they open the Second Trio at around ♪=138, and accelerate subtly through the transition to as high as 144 before relaxing to around 132 to massage extra sweetness into the ensuing Mendelssohn-like theme.

The sound quality is likewise high and the production professional. The only slight problem in this area is that the cello sometimes gets a little lost. This owes partly to Gouvy’s scoring, as the piano tends to clutter the cello’s register (although the Münchner Klaviertrio’s recording, employing a modern grand, satisfactorily surmounts this challenge), but the Tonmeister would also seem partly responsible.

Benjamin Godard (1849–1895) is largely remembered as a child prodigy who never really lived up to his promise and wound up churning out piano works and songs for the salon, along with a few other trifles, among them a suite for flute (a perennial recital favourite) and a lovely berceuse (from the now entirely obscure opera Jocelyn). Nonetheless, in his own day he earned at least a modest reputation, which extended to Germany and Spain, for his efforts in more prestigious and public genres. His symphonies, concertos and other orchestral works received performances in Paris’s Grands concerts; his operas reached major stages, including Brussels’ Théâtrale de la Monnaie (Jocelyn) and the Opéra-comique (Le Dante, Le Vivandière); and he garnered some significant accolades, including the 1878 Prix de la ville de Paris. A five-page obituary appearing in La vie théâtrale pointed to these accomplishments as evidence of his import to the nation’s musical culture, making scant mention of anything for the salon.Footnote ³

Godard’s reception might make for an interesting musicological case study. One wonders whether twentieth-century historiography placed him in the salon-composer file because on the one hand the music isn’t really strong enough for Godard to stand as an independent, and on the other hand it does not fully commit to any of late nineteenth-century France’s familiar aesthetic orientations (the monumentality and self-seriousness of Franck and his followers, the finely wrought classicism of Saint-Saëns, the lyrical charm of Massenet, and so on) or even engage with Wagner’s legacy in any obvious way.

Some stimulating source material might come from Timpani’s recent CD release containing Godard’s three string quartets (1876, 1877 and 1892), performed by the Quatuor Élysée and, according to the liner notes, recorded here for the first time – a fair claim as far as I can tell. The Élysée players offer a wonderful performance, marvellously – at times breathtakingly – accurate. Their intonation remains superb throughout. Even in passages where Godard tasks as many as three players with simultaneous double stops, or has the entire quartet in hushed, exposed octaves, rarely does anything sound even slightly sour. More impressive still is the unity of the phrasing, which suggests an unusual amount of rehearsal time as well as superb listening skills and intimate familiarity among the musicians, who regularly embed carefully crafted and irregularly paced hairpins of varying lengths within broader crescendo/decrescendo trajectories – all the while maintaining utterly constant balance between the parts. Most impressive of all, though, is the ensemble’s rhythmic accuracy. While Godard’s quartets do not demand exceptional technical prowess, they do not lack their share of agile runs, nimble flourishes and other opportunities for scrappy or muddled ensemble playing. Yet no matter how agile the run or nimble the flourish, everybody here starts together, finishes together and remains together the entire time. Indeed, virtually every note is about as clearly articulated and as perfectly in place as anyone could reasonably expect. Even if one ultimately cares little for Godard’s music, this CD is worth owning for the Élysée Quartet’s virtuosic accuracy and exemplary attention to minute details of ensemble playing.

For all of these real and important virtues, the Élysée musicians take a manifestly conservative approach, one seemingly determined to keep Godard confined to the salon. Their playing is not only highly polished, but also exceptionally polite. They take every opportunity to file down what Godard’s music has in the way of sharp teeth, minimizing potentially severe contrasts between pp and ff and cushioning accents. They also shy away from intense expression. Fast tempos never sound frenzied and slow ones don’t register as profound. Prettiness prevails over any glimmer of the sublime. The Second Quartet’s slow movement, for example, opens with a sparse, chant-like tune mostly in minims, with the quartet spread over four full octaves. The players take this several metronome notches faster than the ♪=56 that Godard notates, subtly colour individual notes with vibrato, and shape phrases elegantly. This is all lovely, but a slightly slower tempo, more austere timbre, and less voluptuous phrasing could produce an altogether richer, mystical or at least mysterious quality. The group only seems truly committed to plumbing the music’s emotional depth when Godard is at his most sentimental, as in the drawn-out coda to the Third Quartet’s slow movement, where they make the most of the minute-long bass pedal and saccharine chromaticism. In sum, these works here sound more like the relatively fluffy pieces for which the composer is known than they need to. One can hardly blame the Élysée musicians for taking a safe route with such unfamiliar repertoire, but Godard’s quartets could sustain a more evocative approach – perhaps leaving the door open for another recording.