Guarneri String Quartet

If Boccherini was mischievously dubbed “the wife of Haydn”, then Arriaga must have been his second cousin or so. These three quartets are lovely works. Particularly noteworthy is the Quartet in E-flat major (No. 3), with its charming “Pastorale” second movement, but they are all rewarding pieces. The Guarneri Quartet plays them beautifully. Because they are marginal pieces in the quartet repertoire, and because this disc appeared in the mid-1990s when the classical glut was in full “glutitude”, it was easy to overlook these performances. However, if you enjoy Haydn and his school, you won’t find a better release than this one—and it’s extremely well recorded too. It’s good to see it back.

The Dover Quartet, “the young American string quartet of the moment” (The New Yorker), makes its recording debutwith an all-Mozart album on Cedille Records honoring the soaring young ensemble’s illustrious teachers and coaches,the Guarneri Quartet.

What release is this that can command such a gaudy price? Well, take another look: that's for 142 (!) CDs, which is what's necessary to compile-for the first time- every Arthur Rubinstein album ever released! One of the great poets of the piano, Rubinstein is heard here on every RCA Victor album he made from 1940-76, and also on one Decca album from 1978. Lastly, you'll hear the fine recordings he made in England for HMV between 1928 and 1940 plus the world-premiere release of two Carnegie Hall concerts from December 8 and 10, 1961 (featuring works by Debussy and Chopin).

Let me declare emphatically that the Guarneris are sensational in this literature; their insightful mastery of Beethovenian semantics remains all-encompassing, and their technical command is absolute… The Guarneri Quartet are in every regard peerless Beethovenians; I can only conclude that here, as elsewhere, their performances come as close as is humanly possible to realising an absolute in these works, as much as modern instruments permit. The recordings, made at New York’s Academy of Arts and Letters in 1991, are likewise beyond criticism. - Michael Jameson