00:00 - I. Allegro quasi allegretto (Assez animé mais sans bousculer)
05:21 - II. Adagio (Doux et lié)
08:31 - III. Intermezzo: Tempo di Siciliana (Allegretto)
10:48 - IV. Finale: Allegro con moto (quasi allegro vivace)
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Harp: Xenia Schindler
Cello: Curdin Coray
Violin: Robert Zimansky
Viola: Monika Clemann
Flute: Philippe Racine
Year of Recording: 1999
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"The Primavera Quintet opens with immediate lift into the airiest tissue of childlike charm and happiness sustained through its four movements, playing together around a quarter-of-an-hour -- making the strongest possible contrast with the earlier Piano Quintet, Op. 80 (composed between 1908 and 1921), that testament of crisis and overcoming whose final movement arrives, through oneness with consoling nature, at joy. But where the latter's athletic bounding and springing are the strenuous marks of renewed health hard won, the "Primavera" is the vivaciously relaxed utterance of a true Frohnatur. Yet a master hand is everywhere evident, in the unbarred rhythmic fluidity that nevertheless never loses impetus, the delineation of the movements' ternary form by various instrumental combinations within the ensemble, and -- above all -- in Koechlin's contrapuntal dexterity, which has the deceptive simplicity of a round and textures never heavy or academic but of the most enchanting polyphony.

Begun in February and completed on April 22, 1936, the "Primavera" comes at the moment of ultimate disillusion in Koechlin's infatuation with film star Lilian Harvey, whom he had seen -- twice -- on August 7, 1934, in Princesse à vos ordres with explosive results. Over the following two years, Harvey inspired well over 100 pieces in which the contrapuntally obsessed manner of the 1920s -- massive, complex, Gothic -- put on its most smilingly accessible face. His letters and autobiographical writings are rife with asides on Harvey as the incarnation of his feminine ideal -- "She is in reality a mixture of very diverse elements: comedy, acrobatics, clowning, and on the other hand, (when the occasion demands) of sentimentality not devoid of poetry, childlike and radiant joy...." But when she failed to acknowledge his letters, manuscripts, and the proposal of a scenario in which they would co-star, his ambivalence, wavering between wish-fulfillment and reality, swung to the latter. As he was completing the "Primavera," Harvey was filming on location at Antibes, and with the opportunity to meet her at hand...he sent his wife to deliver more manuscripts of the music she'd evoked in a final halfhearted attempt to interest her. By that time he knew actual contact could only have been a disappointing anticlimax, for the ideal mirage her films conjured had re-awakened him and been subsumed in his music. A private premiere was given by the Ensemble Jamet chez one Madame Amos on June 10, 1943; the public premiere by Ensemble Jamet was heard on March 14, 1944, hosted by the Concerts du Groupe Parisien." (Adrian Corleonis)
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