As I imagine, every music-lover knows by now that the Amadeus Quartet has ended its long and distinguished concert and recording career following the death a few months ago of its violist Peter Schidlof. Its four members made their ensemble debut in January 1948 in the Wigmore Hall in London and indeed the quartet has always been regarded as English although all its members save the cellist Martin Lovett were Viennese by birth and incidentally, also pupils of the Austrian violinist Max Rostal. Though the quartet had success in a wide repertory, it is nevertheless with the Viennese classics that they were especially associated, and of course Mozart was a central figure in their performing art. This set of six CDs thus provides a fitting memorial to one of the great ensembles of our time, whose work is fortunately preserved for the most part in recordings of good technical quality. The present performances are, of course, by no means new and indeed will already be familiar to many collectors; the earliest (K387 and K458) belong to sessions in Hanover that took place in 1963 and the most recent, of the teenage quartets from K155 to K173, are from 1975–6 Munich performances. None of the great mature quartets was recorded later than 1969, in fact, though this need not worry us since the quality of the sound is at the very least serviceable. The four different recording locations (the other two are Berlin and Vienna) do produce correspondingly varied tonal pictures, but here again the discrepancies are unlikely to disturb the listener taking one quartet at a time.
Admirers of the Amadeus Quartet will not need to be told what to expect in terms of performance style. This is a rich and sonorous approach to Mozart, and an affectionate one too. It is as if the players are anxious to extract every drop of expression from the notes and in general one can say that few musical points are missed. On the other hand, I must confess to feeling that this can be wearing particularly in the earlier music where at times I long for an unforced simplicity, but also often in the better-known later quartets. The first quartet of all, the G major, K80 written by a brilliant 14-year-old, perhaps illustrates this: its opening Adagio is too ripe for my taste and the Allegro that follows too heavy and Germanic: possibly the high dynamic level of the CD transfer contributes to my reaction, but the playing itself has an emphatic style that strikes me at least as unsuited to the music. (Similarly the Minuet does not dance.) Still, many people will not be disturbed and indeed may love the intense commitment of the playing, and certainly such a movement as the Adagio of K156 has subtlety as well as a fine sense of overall line, and the Presto finale of K157 sparkles as it should, while Norbert Brainin's opening solo in the Andante of K159 (possibly played on his Guarneri del Gesu) has a fine eloquence.
The Amadeus are at their finest, not surprisingly, in the later quartets including the six dedicated to Haydn and the final three ''Prussian'' Quartets. Here they are more willing to play with intimacy and quiet intelligence and less inclined to indulge in rhetoric and exaggeration. I find the recording here kinder to the ear, too, unlike that of the first two CDs, which seem all too rarely to allow dynamics less than mezzo forte. Listen, for example, to the brilliantly polyphonic finale of K387 in which the players have a real exchange rather than jointly addressing a large audience in a hall: the result makes for better recorded performance and I think better Mozart. The ambiguous mood of the finale in the D minor Quartet, K421 is well conveyed too. But I do not much care for the rather harsh sound of the strings in the forte passages of the Hunt—recorded in the same location as K387—which is the work of the players themselves.
It must be clear by now that I do have reservations about this set, though it's worth saying again that many people will take another view. I cannot hesitate in preferring the Quartetto Italiano's masterly Philips account of these Mozart quartets, which I find more revealing and refined, and which enjoys a satisfying (though also elderly) recording. The format is less generous though: eight discs where the Amadeus have only six. The Amadeus, who also play the two Divertimentos, K136–7, offer CDs of which none is less than 70 minutes long.'