Chamber Music & Song Vol.1

Regarded as a French composer, Hahn was actually born in Venezuela, returning to Paris at the age of three and showing a prodigious talent for music - entering the Paris Conservatoire aged just ten to study composition with Massenet and Saint-Saëns - and like his teachers, he worked in a strongly melodic and tonal idiom. The main works here are a Piano Quartet and a Piano Quintet. His Quintet of 1921 has an arresting opening, with fluid piano writing and idiomatic and effective writing for the strings. It is a hugely underrated work in the repertoire. The Quartet is a very late work (1946) and smaller in scale than the quintet, but nonetheless a substantial and robust piece. The melodies are included in Hahn's own instrumental transcriptions.