Lend an ear KENNICOTT Too many years of chamber music devotion led to a thirst for orchestration - but could Saint-Saens be the path back again? ongtime readers of Gramophone may recall that I used to write a chamber music column This was at a time I 'when I also edited a small chamber music magazine and worked for the national chamber music association. It was all things chamber music for several years.

music crowd is convinced that their particular pleasure is superior. Chamber music is pure music, music reduced to its essentials. All else is frippery and pretension. Orchestrating music is like covering a classical temple with slick and unnecessary ornament, like putting a gargoyle atop the Parthenon or painting the Villa Savoye chartreuse and wallpapering the interior.

Voices, without which I quickly grow fretful, are suspect, allowed in the chamber salon only under special dispensation. Brahms let in an alto in his songs with viola and piano; Schoenberg snuck in a soprano in the String Quartet No 2. But the strict regime of the chamber high holies — the piano trio or the string quartet, the four maddeningly "rational people conversing" that Goethe spoke of— doesn't usually allow vocal interlopers.

For a while, I tried to worship at these altars. The chamber music cult was paying my meagre salary, in one way or another. So I tried to find truth in austerity. If ever I was tempted to think a chamber score would sound so much better with string basses and a tuba below and a small complement of winds atop, I would lacerate myself with Puritan fervour. If ever I thought "double that line, or just throw in a harp," I would slink back home, feeling spiritually defeated and a little dirty.

Eventually I became an apostate. I couldn't live without the pleasures of a hundred pliant souls marching through Mahler or Bruckner under the stern eye of an elevated martinet. Those first months of freedom were wonderful as I rushed back to all the old pleasures. No word thrilled my deprived ear like "tutti". No silence was more golden than a grand pause with a fermata above.

The Mozart Piano Quartet has four wonderful players who finesse the challenge of maintaining individuality while forging a unified ensemble. It's a particular challenge with Saint-Saans, whose roots in the organ seem to inspire chamber textures that are broadly contrapuntal — not in the sense of a fugue, but texturally, the layering and conflict of disparate ideas. The second movement of the Piano Quartet, Op 41, is a daring fusion of a stately and dark chorale with a frenetically nervous and violent contrasting accompaniment, introduced by the piano. The musicians make the difficult fusion of ideas sound seamless.

The recording pairs the Op 41 quartet with the earlier Piano Quartet in E major, written in the early 1850s while Saint-Sanns was a student, but not published until 1992. Simpler, with a more traditional harmonic language than the later work, it is a surprisingly appealing piece, with such honest vivacity and melancholy it is sad that it has remained so long obscure. I hear a good deal of Schumann's Piano Quartet in this early work, especially in the last movement. In any case, it is by no means in the shadow of the larger and more adventurous 1875 Piano Quartet, written after the Franco-Prussian War had inspired composers such as Saint-Saans to think in more self-consciously and vigorous "French" terms.

Again, whatever deficiencies the earlier quartet has (it is, at times, a bit diffuse), the musicians present it with absolute conviction. The same is true of a Barcarolle from 1898, originally for violin, cello, harmonium and piano, but recast (minus the harmonium) for piano quartet. It too has accompaniment figuration that threatens to eclipse the melodic line in a delicious war of foreground and background; it too is masterfully rendered on this recording.

It's a pleasure to hear music made with this intensity, but none of the overplaying that some groups bring to these late, almost orchestral exercises in chamber-playing. I can't claim, based on my delight in this recording alone, to be the prodigal son returned to the fold. The music is too rich and too grand to be a true taste of chamber music asceticism. But after a dozen turns in the CD player, I still think it works quite well without French horns and timpani. CO