Listening to this new recording of the A minor Quartet, the first ever on period instruments, I was put in mind of Schubert’s own verdict on the Schuppanzigh Quartet’s performance of the work in March 1824: “Rather slow, but very pure and tender”. With unusually broad tempos, the Mosaiques consistently stress the music’s pathos, loneliness and fatalism. The Hungarian-flavoured finale is normally seen as a stoically cheerful reaction to the pain that has gone before. But here it steals in as if in a dream from the spectral close of the minuet, the opening melody delicately floated, its off-beat accents barely flicked; where the Alban Berg and the Lindsay bring a faintly military strut to the C sharp minor melody (2'11''), the Mosaiques, suppressing any hint of swagger in the dotted rhythms, distil a doleful balletic grace.
If the Mosaiques’ tenderly abstracted reading of the finale draws it more than usual into the orbit of the preceding movements, the opening Allegro ma non troppo may at first strike you as too resigned and elegiac, wanting in the underlying urgency found in both rival performances. But the Mosaiques shape and colour the music with their customary imagination, always acutely responsive to the ebb and flow of Schubert’s melodic line and his kaleidoscopic shifts of harmony. At the repeat of the melody’s first phrase in bar 11 (0'23'') Erich Hobarth adds a cold, sharp edge to his blanched timbre; as the music moves into A major (0'50'') his tone is warmed and sweetened with discreet vibrato; then, after a characteristic broadening of pulse at the phrase’s melodic and harmonic climax, the Mosaiques make more than either rival group of the decrescendo to a withdrawn piano (from 1'02'') before the abrupt wrench back to A minor. The C major second theme (2'11'') is truly dolce here, as Schubert asks, caressed with touches of portamento and a hint of flexibility to the rhythm. Then, in the development, the Mosaiques decisively vindicate their broad tempo with an implacable, sinewy build to the movement’s central climax (from 8'14''), the crucial repeated-note viola ostinato always palpable in the lucid contrapuntal textures. The timing and colouring of the poignant, exhausted transition to the recapitulation (from 9'02'') is masterly.
In the Andante of the Rosamunde the Mosaiques, while slower than either of their rivals, never lose sight of the gehende Bewegung, the walking motion that underlies so many of Schubert’s andantes. They match the Lindsay in their tender, sentient phrasing, subtly flexing the pulse in response to harmonic movement. The minuet, with its glassy, vibratoless pianissimos, is more eerily remote, less human in its desolation, than from the Alban Berg or Lindsay; and if cellist, Christophe Coin will raise the odd eyebrow with his unmarked sforzando accent on the sustained low E at the start, his contribution here and in the dreamlike musette-Landler trio is typically vital and eloquent.
For their coupling the Mosaiques offer the early E flat Quartet, written when Schubert was just 16. Not even their affectionate, considered advocacy can do much for the dull, harmonically stagnant opening movement. But they relish the raw energy of the Scherzo, with its braying donkey evocations, and bring a delicious demure wit to the Rossinian second theme of the finale (0'58''). And, as in the absorbing, moving reading of the A minor Quartet, the delicacy of nuance and clarity of texture, easier to obtain from the sparer-toned period instruments, is often revelatory.
The recording is clean, vivid and immediate. In sum, yet another outstanding disc from the Mosaiques, comparable with the finest modern-instrument readings, including the two listed above, in musical insight and expressive subtlety.'