A glamorous line-up of soloists is, of course, far from a guaranteed recipe for success in chamber music, especially in a work as democratic as the Schubert Quintet. But at the 1952 Prades Festival, Stern, Casals and colleagues achieved the miraculous in their now legendary recording, reissued by Sony with Casals’s hitherto unpublished 1953 Schubert Fifth Symphony. Now, over 40 years on, Stern has teamed up with an equally starry first cellist, Yo-Yo Ma, and three distinguished colleagues in a reading that often recalls the Prades performance in style and spirit. The quality of the string playing is predictably fabulous, the communion between the five players close and intent, and the music-making marries keen intellectual and structural command with a generosity and spontaneity of impulse. In the first movement I specially admired the breadth and intensity of phrasing, the tender, natural inflexion of the gorgeous second theme (2'02'') – though Ma eschews Casals’s use of portamento here – and the sustained tension and sweep of the development, conceived in one vast span, with the players realizing all the disturbing power of Schubert’s muscular, rebarbative counterpoint.
Like Stern, Casals et al in 1952, the players bring to the Scherzo tigerish attack and demonic drive, suggesting an edge of desperation to the rollicking dance; the Trio, by contrast, is uncommonly slow and searching, evoking the haunted world of the Heine songs (“Ihr Bild” and “Am Meer” from Schwanengesang) composed a few months earlier. And for all the Viennese grace and Gemutlichkeit of its second theme (0'59''), the finale, too, has a desperate, almost manic energy: even at the opening, with its stinging off-beat accents, there is something fevered about the rustic jollity. With the successive quickenings of the pace in the coda (from 6'20''), here sounding absolutely inevitable, the gaiety becomes increasingly hysterical, even nightmarish; and the massive accent on the final D flat makes the close even more ominously ambivalent than usual.
My one real reservation about this powerful and disquieting performance is the lack of true pianissimo quality, partly, though one suspects not wholly, a consequence of close microphone placing. This, of course, affects the slow movement above all: the opening, while moving in its simplicity and avoidance of expressive mannerism, is a shade too palpable, especially when compared with the hushed, disembodied (and daringly slow) reading by the Lindsays; and at the very last statement of the theme, marked ppp (from 10'34''), Stern’s pizzicato chords are certainly too loud and intrusive, compromising the mood of ethereal contemplation. On the other hand, the players go for broke in the central F minor catastrophe (from 4'30''), Stern and Ma singing their great despairing melody with an abandon that rivals (and a purity of intonation that surpasses) Stern and Casals in the 1952 recording.
So while the outer sections of the Adagio lack the last degree of inwardness and spirituality, this is an intensely compelling reading of the Quintet that realizes to the full the unease and terror that shadow the music. It certainly ranks among the finest available, which in addition to the Lindsays and the 1952 Prades performance include the superb, classically conceived reading by the Alban Berg Quartet with Heinrich Schiff. Close balance apart, Sony’s recording is fine, with a welcome clarity in the inner parts. The new disc’s attractions are enhanced by the inclusion of all marked repeats (of the rival versions only the Lindsays play the important first-movement exposition repeat) and by the presence of the Boccherini E major Quintet, the one with the world’s most famous minuet. The other three movements prove no less delightful, with their characteristic mixture of sensuality and leisurely grace enlivened in the finale by touches of exotic Spanish colour; Stern and his colleagues give a highly appealing performance, full of subtle touches of timing and colour and savouring alike Boccherini’s delicate detail and his often luscious textures.'