Boccherini wrote his dozen piano quintets late in life, at the end of the 1790s; they are probably the finest achievements of his late years and he himself thought well enough of them to arrange them all for string quintet (with two violas) and most for guitar quintet. His isolation in Spain from the European mainstream led him, it seems, into an increasingly individual and eccentric style in those years, as the odd features of the works on this CD demonstrate. The last of them is the well-known set of variations (originally written for a string quintet) on the Ritirata notturno di Madrid, where a traditional march theme is varied, beginning pianissimo as if in the distance, rising to a vigorous climax and then fading away, as if a procession were passing: it is handled with typical charm and humour. That quintet ends with a spirited polonaise.
The A minor Quintet is another particularly fetching piece, where Boccherini uses one of his favourite devices to weld the work together: the slow movement incorporates the minuet, and the first movement recurs after the fourth – and it is a specially attractive movement in which Boccherini seems, impishly, to be playing games with the ideas and the harmonies rather than developing them in any more traditional way. The E minor work is distinguished by its “Provensal”, a very lively and catchy dance-like piece that forms the finale (with an extra slow movement as its middle section). The E flat Quintet is slightly more conventional but marked by its decorative, teasingly repetitive central Allegretto, with peasant-like drone bass passages, and its vivacious finale, again an example of Boccherini’s playing with thematic snippets (one could say motifs, but that sounds too earnest) and textures.
It is a pity that this disc partly duplicates, in its selection, the excellent ones by Cohen and the Quatuor Mosaiques, especially as so many of the other quintets in the dozen are as yet unrecorded. But the performances here are a real delight. Andreas Staier’s precise articulation on the forte-piano – unfortunately the booklet fails to indicate that these are period instruments – and his limpid lines, as well as his feeling for the epigrammatic character of some of Boccherini’s utterances, give particular pleasure, and indeed all the players show a real sympathy for the individual idiom.'