Mozart The Piano Quartets

Mozart wrote a plethera of fine chamber music in the galante style of the classical era: Quintets for various instruments, string quartets, string trios, string duos, piano trios, violin sonatas and the two magnificent piano quartets here. With these two quartets, Mozart more-or-less invented the genre which was later taken up by Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak. These piano quartets show Mozart in both a dramatic mode in the minor work and a typical merry mood in the major piece.

Following a highly successful series of concerts in the summer of 2022, Francesca Dego, Timothy Ridout, Laura van der Heijden, and Federico Colli headed into the studio to record Mozart’s Piano Quartets. Whilst he may not have been the first composer to add a viola to the popular piano trio, Mozart was certainly the first to do so with such outstanding success. In his piano quartets, the strings become an equal partner to the piano, rather than mere accompaniment – much as in his piano concertos.

This recording is over 20 years old, so it's hard to believe that it hasn't been reviewed yet. Domus is long gone, and its members have morphed into the Florestan Trio, but it was a great group, and by the time they recorded these Mozart pieces, they had been together for a dozen years. The music is mature Mozart, roughly contemporaneous with "Le Nozze di Figaro" (1785), and it's superbly played and recorded here.

Renaud Capuçon’s exciting new Mozart project for Deutsche Grammophon comprises three albums and two STAGE+ performances, all to come before the end of the year. Together they encompass the artist’s multi-faceted career as concerto soloist, chamber musician, artistic director and mentor to outstanding young talent. Mozart: The Violin Concertos, recorded with the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne (OCL), of which Capuçon is Artistic Director, is scheduled for release on 29 September 2023. Recorded with three of the emerging artists mentored by Capuçon, Mozart: The Piano Quartets will follow on 10 November, and will inaugurate the Capuçon-DG Beau Soir imprint. The violinist’s trilogy of 2023 Mozart albums will be launched, meanwhile, with the release on 23 June of Mozart: Sonatas for piano and violin, made with American pianist Kit Armstrong.

The boy Mendelssohn's precocity never ceases to amaze: not even Mozart as a teenager was so complete a master of the craft. These quartets contain some of the finest music he wrote during those extraordinary years, dating as they do from 1822 (when he was 13) to 1825. There are many of the characteristics that were always to mark his music: the instinct, shared among nineteenth-century composers virtually only with Weber and Berlioz, for the fleeting scherzo, including the somewhat elliptical, quasi-nocturnal scherzo; the gift for tender, expressive melody, not yet tinged with the sentimentality that could afflict him when the manner overcame the matter; and, which is less often emphasized, the extraordinary instinct for structure.