Susan Tomes

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.

Here's a piece you don't often hear performed in concert: Mozart's Divertimento in B flat major, K. 254 (aka, his Piano Trio No. 1). While the other five works in the same form are performed frequently by virtue of their later date of composition, the early Trio No. 1 is not only rarely performed in concert, it's usually recorded only in context of all the other trios. And so it is here: Trio No. 1 leads off this 2007 Hyperion disc by England's Florestan Trio, and, naturally, it is followed by two later trios – No. 2 in G major, K. 496, and No. 5 in C major, K. 548.

This profound, yet still often light-hearted, E flat Trio was written in the same month (November) that Schubert completed Winterreise. We are instantly reminded of this in the Florestan's eloquent and aptly paced account of the C minor Andante con moto, with what Richard Wigmore describes as its 'stoical trudging gait'.

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.

The collection gathers the best relaxing tunes from the piano repertoire performed by most eminent musicians: Piotr Anderszewski, Leif Ove Andsnes, Daniel Barenboim, Bertrand Chamayou, Aldo Ciccolini, Samson François, Hélène Grimaud, Stephen Kovacevich, Nicolai Lugansky, Maria-João Pires, Maurizio Pollini, Anne Queffélec, Alexandre Tharaud and Alexis Weissenberg.