A captivating record. To be sure, if you like the Viennese classics to sound suave and demure, it may not be for you: there’s plenty of mellifluous playing, but the dominant impression is of rhythmic energy, drama and colour – with the characters of all five instruments vividly projected. The rival original-instrument version led by Jos van Immerseel, with Danny Bond’s bassoon playing in common, is lively and sensitively phrased, but the shaping here, in both quintets, is much more individual and expressive. Robert Levin is an unusually creative performer – not just in the way he searches for the right sound and style for every passage, but in his ability to add happily conceived extra ornamentation and short cadenzas, in the Mozart especially, where he starts to elaborate the text as early as the third bar. The wind players catch the mood and make appropriate decorations, too, particularly during repeated sections. Some may feel that this sort of thing has no place on a record which may be played many times. I’d argue that a recording can never be more than one performance, that the ornamentation, wonderfully stylish, really does add something to the music, and that it’s impossible to imagine that Mozart himself would have always stuck to the written text.
The recorded sound is admirably clear, with a pleasingly intimate quality (the fortepiano sounds smoother and less clangorous than on the Accent version). And the disc would be well worth acquiring just for the Horn Sonata; Levin and Halstead give it a touch of extravagance and bravado that seems to capture the essence of early Beethoven.'