This is the second CD in what I trust will be a series of four, with all 12 of the Boccherini piano quintets (the first disc was reviewed in December 1992). As I write, the Quatuor Mosaiques and Patrick Cohen have just completed a highly successful four-concert series at the Wigmore Hall. They do not treat Boccherini as a Dresden-china composer, all delicacy and exquisiteness, though there is a good deal of that; they treat this music pretty robustly—as of course they can, using period instruments, in a way they could not with modern ones as the sound would become too thick and too loud. The opening movement here of the E minor Quintet (one also done at the Wigmore) exemplifies this: it starts with the most gentle of pianissimos, but the dynamic range is very wide, with ebullient tuttis and long crescendos during those typical passages where Boccherini uses ostinato figures with slowly shifting harmony and builds up a formidable degree of tension. In this particular movement, too, he does extraordinarily ingenious things with scales: you would never imagine they could be so expressive, indeed so varied in their expressive significance.
I hope I am making the music sound intriguing. It certainly is. The minuets, so gentle and graceful in the earlier Boccherini, here still have plenty of gentleness and grace, but also intensity and passion. The slow movements are often deeply poignant, and frequently dramatic too; listen to the rhetorical gestures in the Adagio of G407 and the forceful figurative writing and powerful accents in the Poco adagio of G408. The finale of G408 ends with its material becoming transformed into the material of the first movement; I can think of no other example of such a procedure, certainly from the classical period. G411 abjures the usual movement scheme in favour of a grandiose Andante to start with, followed by a minuet, then a repeat of part of the Andante leading to a brilliant and jolly march, and last a fascinating, beautifully textured and ultimately very exciting set of variations. I can't imagine performances better than these: the rhythms springy, full of subtle details of timing, alert to the faintest hints of shifts in the music's expressive sense, and finely polished and balanced, with touches of real virtuosity equally from Patrick Cohen and the quartet players. It is excellently recorded and there is an authoritative note from Yves Gerard. This will certainly be one of my discs of 1994.'