Sony’s resident period-instrument ensemble certainly bring plenty of fire and virtuosity to Haydn’s last quartets. Both the scherzos in Op. 77 come off well, with leaping, kicking rhythms and sharply pointed accents; and the Hungarian-flavoured finale of the G major No. 1 is as pungent and exhilarating as any version I know. Here and elsewhere Vera Beths negotiates Haydn’s stratospheric violin writing with dazzling panache. In the first movement of the G major, however, virtuosity too easily becomes an end in itself: the players tend to press the music unforgivingly, dashing off the pervasive triplets with a cold, mechanical brilliance. At a less smart tempo the Quatuor Mosaiques allow the music to breathe and dance, giving space to Haydn’s brief moments of lyricism and building the development’s central climax with real breadth and weight.
The Mosaiques bring a better sustained line to the opening movement of No. 2, where L’Archibudelli introduce many little unmarked accents and almost invariably make a diminuendo on sustained notes: the upshot is often fussy, compromising the music’s nobility and spaciousness. On the new disc, too, the crucial opening dotted figure is too rarely audible in its frequent reappearances in the lower parts – as in the second subject (1'09''), where the motif in the second violin is submerged by the first violin’s counter-melody. In the sublime slow movements, L’Archibudelli are altogether brisker and more clear-eyed than the Mosaiques, astonishingly so in the Andante of No. 2 where, emphasizing the music’s march background, they take 6'12'' to the Mosaiques’s ruminative, mesmeric 9'29''. Both here and in the Adagio of No. 1 L’Archibudelli respond sharply to the music’s drama and rhetoric; but they rather miss its tenderness, its shadows and its visionary strangeness. To take just one small instance, hear how much more the Mosaiques make of Haydn’s wonderful, veiled harmonies on the theme’s last appearance in No. 2 (5'07'' on the new recording, 7'53'' on the Mosaiques disc).
L’Archibudelli yield little to the Mosaiques in the two-movement fragment, Op. 103; and as a bonus they append an arrangement of the gravely touching part-song, Der Greis (“The Old Man”) whose incipit Haydn had printed as a visiting card in his last years. Sony’s recorded sound is perfectly acceptable, if a shade closer and more reverberant than I find ideal. There are many good things here, then, especially if you prefer your Haydn slow movements flowing and direct; and the actual playing is first-rate. But I’m in no doubt that the equally accomplished Mosaiques offer the more subtle and searching readings of this rich, humane and ceaselessly inventive music.RW