Any string quartet that knows a good double-bass player and is happy to send the viola off on holiday for a few days can have enormous fun with the six string sonatas that Rossini wrote in Ravenna at the age of 12—''composed and copied by me in three days and performed in a doggish way by Triossi, the Morini brothers, and the second violin by myself who was, to tell the truth, the least doggish''. Fortunately, the message seems to be getting through that these wonderful works are best heard in their original quartet version. Not before time, the hegemony of bloated chamber orchestra versions is being challenged in the catalogues.
Philips still steadfastly fail to reissue the classic 1979 LP recording by Accardo, Gazeau, Meunier and Petracchi but it was a great pleasure last autumn to welcome a generally fine new quartet version of the sonatas by members of the Serenata of London on ASV. Both Accardo and the Serenata players used modern instruments. Now four members of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment go one better and use period strings. Rossini probably wouldn't have given a damn; whichever group one turns to, the virtuoso playing confines the doggish tendency to tailwagging in some of the young maestro's more irresistible allegros.
Still, the period strings are wonderfully sonorous (like ASV, Hyperion favour a very close recording) stressing the music's surprisingly robust vertical dimension, whilst the almost vibrato-free sound tends both to tether and toughen Rossini's brief melodic outpourings. Whether he would have wanted to sound quite as chaste as this in some of his amorous adagios, I wonder; that said, the OAE players do tend to delve deeper into one or two of these movements than their ASV rivals.
In the end, both discs give great pleasure, with this newer version perhaps edging ahead with its special moments of cherishable guile and intensity. On cassette, the excellent ASV players have the field to themselves.'