Beethoven Alina Ibragimova

"Mozart Violin Sonatas," proclaims the main graphic of this release by pianist Cédric Tiberghien and violinist Alina Ibragimova. Then the track list title reads "Sonatas for keyboard and violin." In reality the program contains both types, for the two-CD set traverses much of Mozart's output for the two instruments, and his attitude toward the relationship between them changed over the course of his career.

The Chiaroscuro Quartet has embarked on a chronological, single-album cycle of Beethoven's quartets, and the group returns here with the second volume, offering the fourth, fifth, and sixth quartets from the composer's Op. 18 set of six. The group uses gut strings and early instruments (second violinist Pablo Hernán Benedí plays a 1570 Amati instrument) that impart a physicality fitting the quartet's expressive aims. The word "chiaroscuro" befits this quartet, which, even in Haydn quartets, offers high-contrast performances.

The Mozart sonatas for fortepiano and violin, as they are accurately called, represented a genre that was beginning to become old-fashioned in Mozart's own time, with the piano the dominant instrument and the violin, during Mozart's youth at least, an almost optional accompaniment. They aren't played as often as Mozart's other chamber music, but there are many ways to play them. It is good to have a spate of new recordings oriented toward historical performance; these put the listener closer to Mozart's experimental frame of mind in this genre.

After their exciting interpretations of Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert, the Chiaroscuro Quartet now turns to Mozart's Prussian Quartets, his last compositions for this formation. These quartets were written for Friedrich Wilhelm II, King of Prussia and amateur cellist, and offer that instrument an unusually prominent role. The first of the three was composed fairly quickly, in June 1789, but the next two were not completed until the following year, and in the end Mozart's plan for a set of six came to nothing. The writing of quartets was never an easy matter for Mozart. However, one would hardly guess that the Prussian quartets were the product of 'exhausting labor' (his own words), such is their beguiling ease of workmanship.