"I want to go to heaven on this music," the great pianist Arthur Rubinstein told a TV interviewer as Schubert's C Major String Quintet played in the background. Perhaps Schubert himself did, having finished this high-water mark of the chamber music repertoire two months before he died. Sentimentality aside, chamber players and audiences have long known that they can go to heaven on the piece every time they play, hear or even think about it. Now that the "Stairway to Heaven" rights issue has been settled, the Quatuor Ebene's urgent, surpassingly beautiful new recording of the Quintet, with guest cellist Gautier Capucon (Erato), has emerged as a new route of preference. It's easily 2016 Record of the Year so far.
Whatever it performs, the Ebene has a way of getting to the heart of the music with playing that's maximally intense without becoming overwrought �" in short, that seizes and holds your attention without having to shred it. Simply describing their Schubert Quintet maneuvers a writer into oxymoron. It's fiercely delicate; it's bare-boned full-bodied; it's immaculately detailed big-picture; it's freely taut. It doesn't make the music sound "new"; it makes it sounds ineffably, uncannily right. No matter how many recordings of the Quintet you have, when you hear this one you think, "Yes, that's it!" I, for one, want to go to heaven on this recording.
As it must be, the nearly mystical Adagio is the center of this performance, but what sets the Ebene's performance apart is that it is entirely noise-free. There's hardly any string vibrato in the yearning, leapingly lyrical upper lines; there's never any harshness of attack or release in notes and phrases; the pizzicato lower strings never buzz or growl, and instead mirror the lines above in a kind of subdued, even submerged, watery reflection of them. The agitated central section doesn't lacerate; it erupts from the deep. The movement slows ineluctably but almost unnoticeably, with no loss of its essence. The path to the Brucknerian-Mahlerian Adagio starts here.
Perhaps most remarkable of all, the Scherzo is not a curled-fist-to-the-eyes awakening from a dream you want never to end. It's bracing and raises gooseflesh, but without serrated edges or clumsy accents. The drop into the rich, close-lined trio is natural and without unwanted incident, and for a few moments you're back in the deepest murmurings of the heart. This is contact with something like "pure" music as direct as can be achieved through the medium of bowed strings. The concluding Allegretto, the most vulnerable to feeling banal after all that has come before, here marks a return to an Earth in which there is, consolingly, dance of the most vaulting, exuberant, ultimately breathless sort.
Seizing the opportunity of working outside the usual string-quartet literature, the Ebene finishes the disc with "new" Schubert, five of the composer's songs sung by baritone Matthias Goerne in arrangements for voice and string quintet, in this case the Ebene plus bass player Laurene Durantel. "Der Tod und das Maedchen" and "Die Goetter Griechensland" are songs that, in Schubert's own hand, morphed into great string quartets, or quartet movements. The other three, similarly haunting and death-drenched and hardly random in choice, are "Der Juengling und der Tod," the gender-obverse of "Death and the Maiden," and "Atys" and the more innocent "Der liebliche Stern," ideally suited to the baritone's penchant for melancholy and forthright delivery of ballad-like narrative songs.
Goerne's substantial collection of Schubert songs, over eight volumes featuring different accompanying pianists (Harmonia Mundi), is one of the mandatory parts of any Schubert song-lover's collection; in these five new songs, we encounter Goerne at his most velvet-voiced. The blend with this distinctive, subtle string complement is ideal. The musicians' point is to present the songs as they might have been heard at a "Schubertiade," private gatherings in Vienna salons where musicians �" amateurs in original, best sense, that is lovers, of music �" and above all, friends of Schubert, met and made music with the instruments on hand. These songs have exactly that sense of improvisation, collegiality and, above all, enveloping warmth.
While we're in the neighborhood, Florian Boesch, another baritone Lieder specialist renowned for singing as individual and searching as Goerne's (and even more of a cult figure), has released another volume in his ongoing series of Schubert recordings with pianist Malcolm Martineau (Onyx). Although not noticeably "themed," the program is a carefully thought-out program of songs that reward being heard complete and in sequence.
Like Goerne with the Ebene, Boesch is on his best vocal behavior here, and the recorded sound, which has not always been ideal in this series, is both true and sumptuous. What Boesch's audience particularly likes about the baritone is his willingness to dispense with beautiful sound for its own sake in the expression of feeling. To hear him at his most unrestrained, try his Wigmore Hall lunchtime recital of Schumann and Wolf songs, again with Martineau, which can be heard on demand and free, until Aug. 4, at bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07j3vm5