Jan Panenka needs no introduction: his chamber music recordings could almost be described as legendary. But the Kocian Quartet formed in the early 1970s, is as yet better known in Eastern Europe and Japan than here. Together they give sincere, musicianly performances of both works on a disc playing for the exceptionally generous time of 77 minutes.
Of their rivals in the Piano Quintet, only Ranki and the Bartok Quartet (Hungaroton/Conifer) offer a coupling—though at the cost of exposition repeats (which the Czechs include). From Previn (Philips) and Pollini (DG) and their colleagues you get just the Quintet. In terms of sound per se I've no complaints about the reproduction of Panenka's piano. But its forwardness slightly dwarfs the upper strings. Though never as wiry as their Hungarian counterparts in climaxes, they seem too distant and thin. I should add that the robustness of Brahms's keyboard writing at times even poses problems for Pollini: this top-price issue is not faultless in balance. In that respect as well as in all-round mellowness, I agree with my colleagues that the winners are unquestionably Previn and the Musikverein. It's perhaps because of a somewhat confined acoustic that the Czech performance, though so judicious in tempo and unaffected, doesn't quite leap out at you with the arresting vividness of the Italians, especially Pollini himself, who (even if sometimes questionable in timing) responds to every innuendo with the immediacy of a first-time discovery.
As for the autobiographical C minor Piano Quartet, stemming from the composer's early love for Clara Schumann, that, too, seems to need more tonal bloom from the strings as well as greater intensity of feeling—as it certainly gets from Rubinstein and the Guarneri (RCA) and the more brightly recorded Isaac Stern and his younger colleagues on CBS (my first choice here). All in all, then, not Brahms at his highest voltage. But sympathetic music-making, all the same, and undoubtedly good value for money in terms of duration.'