Mozart String Quartets 14 19

The Amadeus were the most successful and highly-regarded Quartet of the 20th century. Benefitting from the jet aeroplane and from the record industry s ability to reach out to world, they dominated chamber music making for nearly 40 years.

Mozart’s string quintets represent "some of his most sophisticated musical thinking … wonderful music, exhilarating to hear” (from the liner notes by Eric Bromberger). With this three album set, the Alexander String Quartet and Paul Yarbrough complete their Mozart compendium.

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.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s six ‘Milanese’ quartets constitute a milestone in his artistic activity. Written between Bolzano and Milan between 1772 and 1773, they came a few years after the Quartet K80/73f that he had composed in Lodi during his first Italian visit. More than that work, these six pieces – conceived before Mozart left the Milanese public with his third and last work for the Lombard capital, Lucio Silla K135 – constitute one of the first organic sets of string quartets ever conceived. Though based on the model of Haydn, they reveal Mozart’s modern spirit, capable of following a new path and enriching it with his own personal contribution. Thirty years after the first and only recording of these works on period instruments by the Festetics Quartet, here is the recording debut of a young Italian ensemble, with the bonus of the first ever historically informed recording of the Quartet K156’s original second movement.

The three string quartets on this album, Mozart's swan songs in the genre, have been recorded many times, but this version ranks near the very top of the collection. Start with the recorded sound, for which Sony chose the unheralded LeFrak Hall at Queens College in New York. It's a superb example of chamber music engineering, with the instruments miked in such a way that the listener hears them coming from slightly different directions, just one would in a live concert at which one was seated 10 or 15 feet away.