Mozart String Quartets 14 19

With the recordings on this CD, the Armida Quartet has reached the halfway mark in a project that seeks to intimately explore an entire mountain range. Mozart’s complete works for string quartet, to which they devote intense scrutiny within the framework of a recital series that pairs them with contemporary works specifically commissioned for the occasion.

Mozart was still in nappies at the time when Haydn more or less single-handedly invented the string quartet. Nearly half a century later, as he struggled - and failed - to complete his last quartet, Beethoven was already at work on his Eroica Symphony. In the interim, Haydn wrote considerably more quartet masterpieces than Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert put together, raising the medium to a level of sophistication, subtlety and originality that provided a yardstick for all later composers. Mind you, it took him some time to get there: it isn't until the eighth CD of this set that we reach the first of the unequivocally great works, the six quartets which make up Op. 20.

Written between December 1782 and January 1785 the set of six string quartets which Mozart dedicated to Haydn are striking masterpieces, and that he meant them to be so is clear from the printed dedication to his older colleague. ''Dearest friend and famous man,'' he wrote, ''here are… these six sons of mine. They are the fruit of long and laborious effort. One thing has a little encouraged and comforted me: the hope, flatteringly whispered to me, that these musical works might one day be a joy to me… I therefore commend my children to you, hoping that they will not seem totally unworthy of your love.'' Furthermore, Mozart's choice of the medium seems appropriate since he and Haydn had on occasion played together as members of a string quartet, and both surely thought of it as a more refined vehicle for musical thought than the symphony orchestra.

This series of performances dates from between 1966 (when the six quartets Nos. 14-19 dedicated to Haydn were recorded) to 1973 and was rightly saluted on its completion as a fine achievement. The playing of the Quartetto Italiano has a freshness, range and subtlety that vividly realizes the music in all its variety, while technical problems seem to have been solved so that the music-making can be both spontaneous-sounding and thoughtful throughout.