D’Erlanger & Dunhill - Piano Quintets review | Andrew Clements's classical album of the week

The Guardian 60

Piers Lane/Goldner String Quartet
(Hyperion)
Early 20th-century works are immaculately played by the Sydney-based quartet and pianist Piers Lane, though the music itself is oddly uninspiring

By any standards, the Sydney-based Goldner Quartet is one of the finest string quartets around today. Much as one would like to hear them in the core quartet repertory (though they did release a Beethoven cycle on the Australian ABC Classics label a decade ago), it’s to their immense credit that most of their recent recordings have featured either contemporary works composed specially for them, or pieces that have been overlooked by the musical mainstream. Their discs for Hyperion have already included quartets and quintets by Borodin, Taneyev, Bruch, Bloch and Hamilton Harty, and their latest pairing of piano quintets by Frédéric d’Erlanger (1868-1943) and Thomas Dunhill (1877-1946), immaculately played with Piers Lane as the pianist, maintains that focus on the forgotten and the neglected.