Mozart: The Six String Quintets
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Composer: Wolfgang Amadeus MozartPerformer: Talich Quartet
Edition: Music CD
Format: Box set, Import
CD Release Date: 1999-10-12
Music Label: Calliope France
Free Music Notes for Mozart: The Six String Quintets
Free Music Review: Superb: intimate, intense music-making and some very special works
Hit: 5 Stars
It's a tough question: which would I rate higher: Mozart's six string quintets, performed here, or his six string quartets dedicated to Haydn--considered the best quartets he ever wrote? After listening for days to this set, the best performance of these works I've ever been lucky enough to hear, and to the Ysaye Quartet's performance of the Haydn quartets (also available on Amazon, and very reasonably-priced), I still don't know. If pushed, I'd have to say the Haydn quartets are overall of a more consistently high level, but the quintets have some unique moments of brilliance and experiment unmatched anywhere else in Mozart's creations: if you were to ask any music student who was more experimental and ground-breaking, Mozart or Beethoven in either of his first two "periods" (and remember this includes the middle quartets) , he or she would reflexively say Beethoven. Yet where in LvB's output is there a K. 593, with its extraordinary slow-fast-slow-fast first movement construction? Did Beethoven ever try anything so bold before his last period? These quintets are in many ways Mozart's laboratory for experiment.
And if you're looking for a great set of Mozart's quintets, search no more. This set is outstanding on every level. The five musicians involved capture the intimacy and give-and-take of great chamber playing. In particular their shading, their subtle dynamics, are magnificent (and here to superior to the much-vaunted Griller quartet recordings of these works), transparent while being substantial, light while being firm, with gorgeous clarity. Their performances are captured in very natural, intimate sound, and fortunately are not awash in all that reverb that is so commonly added to music classical music these days. It sounds, as another reviewer here points out, as though they are in your living room, performing in front of you. Some reviewers here have complained of a defective third disc in their sets, and even Amazon's own sound samples feature sonic glitches, but I decided to roll the dice anyway and fortunately for me my set arrived fine.
These are not HIP-influenced, super-sensitive to what scholarship tells us Mozart "intended." They're not excessively romantic, but they are more of the "old school." I approve heartily. In these performances the beauty of the G minor's slow movements shine through as I've never heard before, and in the midst of ecstasies I really don't care if this or that inflection or vibrato is "correct." (I'm of the school convinced that Mozart was headed a lot closer to Romanticism than most people realize anyway. Listen to the Symphony No. 40 and tell me that's the work of a "classicist.") I'd rather be transported by the beautifully transparent sound of the muted strings in that piece's Adagio ma non troppo. And listen, in the first movement, to the bite as they play the last phrases of the main theme (around 3:25 is a good example, though not the only one). They can get intensely expressive, but *they never feel like they're pushing it.* Another example is K.416, the first movement of which is taken at a relaxed and expansive tempo, yet which is all the more dramatic because of it, with a dark sound in the viola and a carefully attention to how to build drama from the smallest nuances of shading.
Some of these works are miraculous. Listen--really listen--to K. 516. This is Mozart's "Eroica" Quintet. I believe it was about this work that Maynard Solomon said Mozart was proclaiming to Vienna, Listen to what I could do, if only you were ready for it! The development section is extremely long--I wouldn't be surprised if it were Mozart's longest. When I hear works like this, I wonder how music would have been changed had Mozart lived just another ten years. (He still would have been a composer who "died young.")
The Talich are particularly beautiful and persuasive when they play with mutes. Some aspects of these quintets, such as the back-to-back slow movements of K. 516 (listen to how "Romantic" the second one is!), or the fact that two works out of the six are in minor keys, make these special works in Mozart's canon. And while a number of music books still credit Beethoven with moving the scherzo to the second movement in the order of things, Mozart beats him to it in this work. K. 406 also exists in a wind serenade, K. 388. Which do you like better? For me it's a tough call.
There's an added bonus not found in many other "complete string quintet" recordings: K. 581, the Clarinet Quintet. While this is not the best recording I've heard of that particular work, it is a fine one.
This set is a "no brainer" for anyone who loves Mozart and chamber music. We get works as experimental as the great Beethoven quartets, works which are for some reason sometimes still overlooked, at least to some extent. But string quintets have always had a rough time in the repertory, for reasons having more to do with logistics than musical quality--witness the obscurity of Beethoven's one very fine effort in the genre. But here is a feast of great music, beautifully and sensitively performed. Wolfie would have been delighted.
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