Vikram Seth's novel An Equal Music, an elegant classical-music romance, naturally invited the release of an accompanying CD with performances of the music so nicely woven into its story of a pushing-midlife London violinist who encounters a woman, a concert pianist, whom he had loved years before while both were music students in Vienna. Decca's double-CD release ought to extend the emotional satisfaction for lovers of the novel, providing a notably thorough immersion in its musical world. A few pieces are excerpted, but
Haydn's Op. 20, No. 6 quartet, Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending, and
Schubert's "Trout" Quintet are presented in full. There is also a complete performance of
Beethoven's Quintet in C minor, Op. 104, rather creatively presented by both the novel and the disc's marketeers as a lost Beethoven masterpiece. "Includes the world premiere CD recording of Beethoven's String Quintet in C minor," proclaims a sticker attached to the jewel box. True enough, but the work is simply an arrangement of the Trio, Op. 1, No. 3, made by someone else and somewhat reworked for publication by Beethoven in 1817. It is a piece of minor Beethoveniana well known to scholars and the classical hard core, and hardly big news. Unlike almost all other compilations of this kind, this one offers some freshly made recordings, several of them by violinist Philippe Honoré, the work's dedicatee. The other recordings draw from the Decca and Deutsche Grammophon catalogs, going all the way back to 1972 for
Iona Brown's recording of The Lark Ascending with the
Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. The sonic shifts between this and the two brand-new recordings between which it is sandwiched are startling, but as a whole everything coheres in just the way the novel's readers will hope.