In Nimbus's familiar style this recording is generously supplied with ambience, and when the ambience is as pleasing as that of The Maltings, Snape, the result is admirable. The Medici Quartet in any case place a high premium on euphony, and I can imagine many listeners taking delight in the resonant, stringy sound.
As for the interpretations I have to register severe disappointment, for virtually all those qualities which make the Rasumovsky Quartets works of genius appear to be glossed over. Much of the Molto adagio second movement of the E minor Quartet, for instance, is played as though Beethoven had added a qualifying comodo—the over-dotting of the violin line from 0'39'' trivializes a passage of sublime inwardness (the cellist rightly has no truck with this when he has the same material at 5'50''), and when the music stretches to the heights around 8'30'' there is no sense of what an extraordinary moment this is. To give so little due to the piu p after 10'20'' in the first movement is another lapse of Beethovenian instinct, as it is to quit the grinding dominant ninth harmony at 11'07'' so unceremoniously.
These are not isolated instances. In the slow introduction to the C major Quartet (modelled on Mozart's Dissonance) there is little response to the remarkable exploratory trills, and later in the first movement much of the harmonic flux goes pretty well uninterpreted (especially in the development section), not to mention some dubious intonation in the introduction, the absence of the bass from the first chord of the first subject and other minor technical hitches. Some movements, notably the suave and well-sprung finales, are fine so far as they go, but in terms of penetration beneath the surface of the score that is not very far. The musical point of Beethoven's silences and moments of withdrawal, for example, is not convincingly registered (and there is a bad misreading from the first violin at 2'47'' in the finale of the C major). The Medici are surely too fine an ensemble to rest content with such a neo-classical manner—it does scant justice either to the music or to themselves.'