This is really a record for specialist collectors of two kinds. Lovers of Dvorak's music will not want to miss the opportunity of adding so rare a work as the early Piano Quintet, Op. 5 to their shelves. What we have is a revision, made just before the more famous work also here recorded, but it is still immature and with glimpses of the true Dvorak only beginning to show through a careful and not always wholly convincing manipulation of form and ideas. Lovers of Richter's art will be sure to want to acquire his wholly characteristic performance of both works, but especially of the Op. 81 Quintet. This is lively, elegant and vivid, not least in the Furiant. Where Bishop-Kovacevich (Philips) plays with a nimble grace, Richter gives the music a more demonic quality that is at the same time deft and sprightly. The opening, which includes some of Dvorak's most beautiful pages, is tenderly handled by both artists, and indeed by Clifford Curzon on his much older record with the Vienna Philharmonic Quartet (Decca).
There are drawbacks, however. One is the actual recording, made at a live performance in the Rudolphinum in Prague. Though the audience is well behaved, with only a stray cough to betray its presence, the sound is rather hoarse and the balance between instruments less good than on the Bishop-Kovacevich record. The other main drawback is that to put music lasting just eight minutes over the hour on two whole records strikes me as on the parsimonious side. Bishop-Kovacevich gets the whole work on one side, with the E flat String Quartet on the other; Curzon takes most of a record but finds rooms for the Schubert Quartettsatz. The Richter gives us just the first movement on the opening side, only a little over 13 minutes. I imagine the problem was that the works are too long to be both fitted on to a single side without some cutting, and there was nothing else suitable to make up the second record. One sees the practicalities, but they make this pair of records rather an extravagance. When it arrives the single CD will obviously be an advantage in this respect.'