I wonder if some of these ex-Soviet musicians are refugees from the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra. The tautly integrated ensemble reminds me at times of the sound of Mravinsky's string section. Whether Lazar Gosman is as imposing a disciplinarian as Mravinsky I can't say, but he certainly seems to have these musicians continually on the points of their toes. The precision can be unnerving, as in the opening of the second of Shostakovich's Two Pieces, Op. 11, where even the upward sweep to the high harmonic E is immaculately synchronized. In the torrential coda of the first Allegro of the Sinfonietta (Gosman's own arrangement of Shostakovich's Eighth Quartet) the sheer force and clarity of the playing almost take one's breath away.
There are moments of poetry too, particularly in some of the solos (and especially the cello's quotation from Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk) though on the whole these aren't friendly performances. The Eighth Quartet isn't supposed to be friendly I realize, but it can strike up a strange and deepiy moving confidentiality with its listeners—that never really happens here. Tchaikovsky's Serenade, too, sounds a might unrelenting in this performance, despite a promisingly sonorous start. The recordings are a little short on bass resonance, though they're also clean and well balanced.'