These are bright, clean performances, and the G major Quartet strides away confidently and buoyantly, while at the same time, the playing has a Viennese warmth that is attractive. However, and not for the first time when reviewing recordings of chamber music, I find that the close recording makes it larger than life, and regret that real soft tone is conspicuous by its absence. Of course one can turn down the volume, but this does nothing to improve the dynamic range and cannot diminish the thickness of texture that results from microphones being too near the four players, and possibly even among them.
This said, the Franz Schubert Quartet are well inside this idiom and shape Haydn's music with intelligence. True, slow movements are perhaps more romanticized than some might choose, but after all, this music was written at around the beginning of the nineteenth century, 30 years before Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique. Indeed, the Op. 77 quartets are contemporary with Beethoven's six quartets, Op. 18 (which are also dedicated to Prince Lobkowitz), and it is quite possible that the older composer's style was affected by that of his extraordinary former pupil and that he would have liked the un-classical intensity that these players bring to the music, and the Beethovenian rough humour that comes out, say, in the Minuet of Op. 77 No. 1, which as played here becomes a scherzo.
The F major Quartet also goes well in this ensemble's full-bodied interpretative terms. There's wit in the amusing Minuet with its lilting trio in D flat, while the variation-form Andante sings expressively and the finale has the right vigour and humour, qualities which belied the composer's years. The D minor Quartet, Op. 103, dates from 1803, when he was already 70, but he left it unfinished and allowed it to be published three years later with a note saying ''gone is all my strength, old and weak am I''. The two movements are in fact the Andante and Minuet of the projected work, but play satisfyingly on their own, with the sad and sonorous Minuet standing as the last utterance of the creator of the string quartet.'