Nicholas Kenyon 

Winds & Piano review – Les Vents Français on top form

Les Vents Français have fun with a flurry of pieces for woodwind and piano, writes Nicholas Kenyon
  
  

vents-francais review
Les Vents Français: too much of a good thing? Photograph: /PR

These are top-notch performances of not always top-notch music. The piano quintets of Mozart and Beethoven need no special pleading, and this international ensemble are at their best in the dreamy opening and the finale’s cadenza of the Mozart. The French timbre characterised by François Leleux’s plangent oboe sounds well suited to Poulenc’s racy sextet and the fine one-movement Divertissement by Roussel. More dispensable are Louise Farrenc’s amiable sextet, a pioneering work of 1852, and André Caplet’s oddly irritating quintet of 1899. The third disc has a sextet by Strauss’s friend Ludwig Thuille, boldly symphonic in scope, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s extremely enjoyable, bubbly quintet. But are eight piano-and-wind works in succession just too much of a good thing?

 

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