Mozart Quintets Auryn Imai

…[O]utstanding…with Perahia's playing wonderfully refreshing in the Andante and a superb response from the four wind soloists… Clearly all the players are enjoying this rewarding music.

Of all the reconstructions prompted by the 1991 Mozart jamboree, Philip Wilby’s recreation of the Violin and Piano Concerto of 1778 was the most worthwhile. Wilby skilfully completed the 120-bar fragment of the first movement and took the slow movement and finale from the unusually brilliant, ‘public’ D major Violin Sonata, K306. There are problems – not least of dates – with Wilby’s thesis that the Sonata is the ‘last resting-place’ of the projected double concerto. But the three movements certainly make a satisfying entity. Midori and Eschenbach give an immensely polished reading, phrasing with unfailing subtlety and sophistication.

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.

Unquestionably, the clarinet quintets of Mozart and Brahms have earned time-honored and well-deserved places in the repertoire of clarinetists worldwide. In the informative and well-written annotations by Eric Hoeprich, we read that “they embody the maturity, depth, experience, and possibly even a premonition of an otherworldliness soon to be experienced firsthand.”

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - String Quintets K.406 & K.516 (1994)
DbPowerAmp secure mode FLAC (tracks+log, no cue) + MP3 (320 kbps CBR) | 274.79 Mb (FLAC) + 136.99 Mb (MP3) | 56:01 minutes | Info & covers.
classical, chamber | Naxos Records. Recorded at the Unitarian Church, Budapest, from 14th to 17h of February, 1994.

Mozart's String Quintet in C minor, K 406 is the composer's own arrangement of a Wind Serenade, K. 388, for two oboes, clarinets, horns and bassoon, written in 1782 at the end of July, shortly after the completion of the Singspiel Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio). It is mentioned by Mozart in a letter to his father on 27th July in that year, described as Nacht Musique but is not in the form or mood of a Serenade. The later arrangement was presumably designed to be advertised with the Quintels K. 515 and 516 on 2nd, 5th and 9th April 1788 in the Wiener Zeitung, where they are announced as schön und korrekt geschrieben, to be had from Johann Michael Puchberg, the textile-merchant and fellow freemason of Mozart, to whom he had lent various sums of money...

Erno” Dohnányi is the least celebrated of the seminal triumvirate of twentieth-century Hungarian composers; Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók have become household names, yet Dohnányi’s posthumous fame hangs upon an unrepresentative handful of compositions. This recording brings together three of his finest chamber works; the two masterful yet hugely contrasting Piano Quintets, and his remarkable essay in that most underutilized of instrumental genres, the string trio.

Mozart’s last string quintets, K593 and K614, were completed during the 12 months preceding his death in December 1791. The medium held a special fascination for Mozart; his Quintet in C, K515 (1787), is arguably the richest, and certainly the longest of all his chamber compositions. The first of the works recorded here by Hausmusik, K593, opens with a discursive introduction, unparalleled elsewhere in the cycle of six quintets.