A good friend who is a concert pianist remarked recently that, judging a piano competition, he had heard a great number of highly capable young pianists with never a note misplayed—but no actual music. At least that’s how I remember his comment. (I withhold his name lest the comment irk his colleagues and also for fear that I may have remade it in my own image!)

Even excellent musicians don’t always manage to produce the sort of musical performance that captures the ear. I suspect one problem is excessive reverence for the classics. Just as our reverence for Scripture can sometimes lure Christians into tedious misreadings of it (not to mention bizarre, cray, and outright dangerous ones), too much reverence for Beethoven, say, or Schubert can produce rather dutiful or mechanical performances of their works, performances that sound more like class exercises than like works of quirky human genius.

Franz Joseph Haydn clearly had a sense of humor—the “Surprise” symphony’s unanticipated jolts, the “Farewell” symphony, where he twits his patron for delaying the return to Vienna. I don’t expect jokes in every work of his, but the humor is an aspect of a lively temperament more broadly speaking. His string quartets have posed a particular problem for me in this respect. I like string quartets as a genre. I like Haydn’s string quartets. But most of the performances I’ve heard have been awfully solemn. I still like them, but I always wonder, “Why do I feel as if I have to make myself sit here to listen?”

Here, I think, another aspect of the problem enters in. I don’t doubt the musicians are having a marvelous time when they play these quartets. In live performances, you can see it. They’re pushing their technique to the full (always a source of satisfaction, whatever art one professes—even, say, the art of Greek grammar and syntax). They’re interacting with each other, evidenced often by the kind of subtle twitches and grimaces that work only with teams that know each other well. And they’re right in the middle of the music, hearing how other parts move in relationship to their own. (Just the experience I like so much when singing in a choir!)

But the audience is often left out. Performance practice often seems to favor a blend of tone that approaches an impenetrable wall—impenetrable from the outside at least. The ear can tell the cello from the other instruments but not much else. At a live performance, seeing the performers helps. But on a recording, it’s a wall of sound.

What prompts these reflections for me just now? Not an egregious example of the problem, but a particularly fine exception to it. I thought twice (well, more than twice, actually) about buying the Eybler Quartet’s recording of Haydn’s Opus 33 (Analekta). Did I need more CDs of material I already have and don’t listen to often? But the review I read was enthusiastic and struck all the right notes for me.

And I’m glad I bit The performance is waggish when it needs to be, lyrical when it needs to be, and has an open quality of sound that lets the listener hear not just the sum total of the music but the pieces that combine to produce it. And it has a freshness that makes me think, “Yes, it must have sounded like that when Haydn was still a human being and not yet a demigod.” And that has to do not just with the historical instruments and practices that the Eyblers employ, but with the joi de vivre that pervades their performance.

Another recent instance of this quality: a CD of suites, songs, and, yes, the “canon” by Johann Pachelbel performed by Gli Incogniti and their conductor Amandine Beyer (Harmonia Mundi). And let me not fail to mention Hans Jörg Mammel, the tenor who gives a wonderfully graceful and unforced account of the songs, from one of which comes the title of the CD, Un orage d’avril (An April storm).

This CD I bought not by because of a review, but “by ear.” I heard one of the suites on the radio and was captured immediately. Had it been the only good thing on the CD, I would still have been content. But everything is equally wonderful. Even the canon sounds new and fresh. The liner notes tell us that the suites come from Pachelbel’s Musikalische Ergänzung, which means “musical delight.” The name fits both the compositions and their performance.

And while I’m on the topic of music that’s really music, I want to add something about another recent acquisition: Bohuslav Martinů‘s music for cello and piano by Karine Georgian and Ian Munro (Alto). I’ve long loved the music of Martinů. I can’t understand why I come across so little of his work in live performance. The symphonies are interesting and knotty, yet broadly appealing music. The piano music can be ravishing, even in its the early-to-mid-twentieth century neo-classical style. And the works on this disc are wonderful in much the same way as the Eybler Quartet’s rendition of Haydn.

Martinů’s sense of humor was a kind of modern counterpart of Haydn’s—fstarting with his early Revue de cuisine with its exuberant Charleston. There are bits of that comic genius on this CD, too, especially in the late Variations on a theme of Rossini. It would be hard not to burst out laughing at some of the variants, though there’s also one that’s exquisitely beautiful. And all the playing is well and truly musical, bridging a wide spectrum of emotion from the beautifully meditative Largo of Sonata No. 2 to the ebullient dance that concludes No. 3.

There’s no sense of solemn classical duty about any of these recordings, just real music. Your cranky critic recommends them all.