Sara Watkins is an artist with a warm and well-varied tone, and she and her colleagues bring both confidence and sensitivity to Mozart's music. The Oboe Quartet is not a long work, but it has some weight of utterance and rightly the first movement's exposition repeat is observed. This music is not played as often as it might be, and since the two other pieces in the programme are rarities, it is good to have the three works on the same disc. In fact, the second was originally a serenade for wind octet and then Mozart rearranged it for string quintet. However, in the present performance the first violin part has been interestingly reassigned to an oboe.
The playing is as assured as we might expect from the participation of the Amadeus Ensemble—as we see from the list of players above, three of them are surviving members of the Amadeus Quartet. The other star name here is that of the producer, John Shirley-Quirk, and the explanation as to why this distinguished singer is taking up a new career is that he is the husband of the oboist. While on the subject of the recording, made in a London church (St Silas the Martyr, Kentish Town), I personally find it rather close, thick and reverberant: to see if you agree, try the Adagio of the Oboe Quartet, a short but expressive piece in D minor, or the finale of the same work, where Norbert Brainin's vivid participation can easily be recognized. Much of the playing is of a quality that may allow you to forget the recorded sound and simply enjoy the music. However, it is not without imperfections: e.g. the shaky violin entry 17 seconds into the slow movement of the Quintet and the oboe's tendency to hurry ten seconds after that and again in the similar passage at 2'33''—indeed, this movement as a whole does not flow very naturally. I feel that the five-player ensemble is trying too hard in a manner we sometimes meet in the Amadeus Quartet's Mozart recordings, and which is also to be felt tonally in the bigger passages in the finale of this work. I enjoyed the robustly played Divertimento in D major best in this programme, while still feeling that the Andantino fourth movement could relax more and noticing a brief background sound at 1'28'' in the initial Marcia alla Francese.'