"Sandrine Piau does not seem destined to make a typical Schubert album. Though her clear, precise voice, musical intelligence and relationship with language were made for this composer (among others), her recordings feature Schubert in mixed-composer programmes, in collaborative transcriptions for viola with Antoine Tamestit (Naïve, 2010) or, as in this new collection, lieder with piano accompaniment replaced by string quartet. It’s a subtly fundamental change since the piano is innately percussive and the string quartet is lyrical. Yet these transcriptions by composer Jacques Gandard work so well that the album has a meant-to-be quality. This may not be good news for keyboard lieder accompanists, though no pianist is likely to lose work if this becomes a trend. Such transcriptions work only with carefully selected songs; the hearty rhythms in Schubert’s folksier modes would not fare well.

What does work: songs concerned with other-worldly matters (death, etc) and harmonies with a basis in voice, such as the amateur singing societies that echo in Schubert’s chord-voicing. One exception is this disc’s version of ‘Erlkönig’, whose heart-racing repeated notes are so pianistic. In the transcription, violins dig into the strings with aggressive tremolo. The cello creates an ominous long-breathed counterpoint that adds to the terror. Piau sings ‘Erlkönig’ more expansively than on her ‘Voyage intime’ album (Alpha, 3/23), starting the song with a richer, darker scene-setting vocal colour. She seems not to consciously differentiate between the father and son voices in the song; that element is dictated by the tessitura of the vocal line. Though the father’s reassurances are sung as lyrically as before, the text articulation sounds more naturally conversational. Without having to compete with piano accompaniment, Piau sounds more comfortable and perhaps able to give more inner bandwidth to probing the song. What follows is the Quartettsatz in C minor, whose tension-building techniques, used so well in the transcriptions, show how well Gandard has absorbed the 19th-century idiom.

The similarly poetic territory of ‘Der Jüngling und der Tod’ is also a triumph, with Piau and the quartet effectively conveying the soothing coolness of death expressed in the song’s final lines. The 15-minute ballad ‘Viola’ is given a smartly sustained narrative (however dated the poetry is) and makes sense of what can seem like abrupt tempo changes. The leaping rhythms of ‘Der Musensohn’ are conveyed in ways that buoyantly project the words ‘you give my feet wings’.

The most substantial solo turn for Quatuor Psophos is the Andante-movement variations from the Death and the Maiden Quartet. Here one realises how much the individual members are vocally orientated, each section fusing well with its surroundings while also creating a complete world unto itself. The quartet’s booklet note (jointly authored, one assumes) suggests that this ‘imaginaire’ quintet is not so imaginary at all. In other words, this is a project that was waiting to happen."

​David Stearns, Gramophone, 12 septembre 2025