The lowest of the stringed instruments, the double bass has few opportunities in chamber music. Schubert’s Trout Quintet (violin, viola, cello, bass and piano) is a rare exception. The Fabergé, all members of NDR Symphony Orchestra in Hamburg, have exchanged the usual second violin for a bass, making a wonderful mellow sound in Vaughan Williams’s early Piano Quintet (1903), one of a number of works he withdrew, and which was only published in 2002. It has the romantic warmth of Brahms, with echoes of old folk songs and modal writing. The work is paired with another Piano Quintet in C minor, by the short-lived and little known Hermann Goetz (1840-76) – an altogether darker and more unsettling work. Let’s hear if for the double bass.
