Two more exquisite tesserae in the Mosaiques’ recorded monument: the period-instrument quartet has now turned to Mozart’s last quartets, and brought to new life music which the pedantically analytical insert-notes, in this otherwise faultless production, wellnigh kill off.
The sheer refinement of the Mosaiques’ playing – its silk-sewn ensemble and its uncanny ability to sense out the living pulse and pace of a work – comes into its own in the sotto voce movements of the K575 Quartet. A single ascending or descending scale can take on a rare beauty. And when these characteristic scales return to seal the first movement in a tiny coda, they are enlivened by the little touches of rubato which breathe air into this performance.
That same touch of rubato awakens the spirit of dance in the Menuetto, lifting the heel and pointing the toe. It is details like these which reanimate this music and give the edge of character to the Mosaiques’ playing, over and above the albeit fine, but more evenly contoured, performances of the Festetics Quartet. The Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm II, who commissioned these quartets, might well have favoured the Hungarian players, though: they point up the music’s privileges for the royal cellist, with Reszo Pertorini’s cello more prominent than that of Christophe Coin, warming and thickening textures.
A combination of repeats and generally slower tempos make the Festetics’ performance of the first movement of the last quartet, K590, seem a little laboured in comparison with the mercurial playing of the Mosaiques. That light, close harmony, with subtly shaded inner voices, which is such a hallmark of the Mosaiques, combines with a perfectly judged pace for the 6/8 Allegretto. And again the Mosaiques takes little moments to catch its breath, so that the hurtling round-dance of a finale leaves us a little less dizzy than it does in the hands of the Festetics.'