W.A. Mozart: String quintets KV 406, KV 516 Salvatore Accardo, Margaret Batjer, Toby Hoffman, Cynthia Phelps, Rocco Filippini

• W.A.Mozart (1756 - 1791): String quintet C minor KV 406:
• 1Mozart: String quintet C minor KV 406: Allegro14:03
• 2Mozart: String quintet C minor KV 406: Andante04:40
• 3Mozart: String quintet C minor KV 406: Menuetto in canone - Trio in canone al rovescio - Menuetto04:55
• 4Mozart: String quintet C minor KV 406: Allegro06:19
• String quintet G minor KV 516:
• 5Mozart: String quintet G minor KV 516: Allegro15:48
• 6Mozart: String quintet G minor KV 516: Menuetto (Allegretto) 05:25
• 7Mozart: String quintet G minor KV 516: Adagio ma non troppo09:44
• 8Mozart: String quintet G minor KV 516: Adagio - Allegro 10:41
• Total Runtime01:11:35

Info for W.A. Mozart: String quintets KV 406, KV 516

As a musical genre the string quintet had its most authoritative representative, during the eighteenth century, in the Italian Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805) who composed some 113 quintets for two violins, viola and two 'cellos. From far off Spain, which at the time was practically isolated from the most active European musical schools, Boccherini was admired for his work but did not form a trend; he had no imitators or disciples to follow and propagate his lesson. His quintets, though they were admired at courts and by the public of aristocratic and bourgeois amateurs, were too closely bound to the particular conditions in which they had been created, and too dependent on the skill of Boccherini as a cellist. In fact, in Boccherini's string quintets it is always the first violin and the first 'cello (whose part is usually written in the higher register and demands great skill of the performer) that lead the essential part of the musical discourse, whilst the other instruments are generally limited to secondary, accompanying figures...

"Mozart is a touchstone of the heart. If I want to do something especially dear to someone, I sit down at the piano and play them a piece by Mozart." With these sentences, the great Mozart interpreter Edwin Fischer has said something essential. From every note of Mozart speaks an extremely sensitive and delicate, loving and at the same time masculine powerful character, which expresses itself with inventiveness and a mastery perhaps only comparable to Bach. That is why it is so difficult to play Mozart's music "correctly", as it often expresses the deepest with the smallest number of notes. Technical mastery alone is not enough. There must also be the ability of the heart to feel and create music as a form of genuine, loving communication with fellow human beings. No other classical composer, for example, entitled a movement with the epithet "amoroso" (Mozart's designation for the Andante of the B flat major Sonata K. 281).

"Beethoven est superbe, mais Mozart est sublime". It would be absurd to ask which of the two is the "deeper". For a long time, Beethoven was considered the composer who expressed the transcendent, the ineffable, especially in his last works.

Indeed, in the variations of his last piano sonata Opus 111, this profundity is "palpable" - everyone feels it, interpreter and listener alike. Mozart's profundity, on the other hand, is incomprehensible and therefore much more difficult to grasp. One can only speak of this mystery of Mozart in metaphors. His sonatas look at us like the gaze of a child, unfathomable, unfathomable. We feel the same way about them as we do about a Goethe poem: it is simply there, and one can hardly believe that it ever once did not exist. The spontaneity and apparent lightness of Mozart's work has led generations of music lovers to believe that Mozart composed without effort, "like a bird sings". In reality, behind this creation lies an infinitely arduous, tireless process of learning and working. Similar to Johann Sebastian Bach before him, Mozart studied numerous works by older and contemporary masters and constantly worked on his own perfection. The result of this combination of God-given talent and diligently acquired mastery was recognised by no one better than Joseph Haydn: "I tell you before God, as an honest man, your son is the greatest composer I know by person and name: he has taste, and above that the greatest compositional science" (quoted in a letter from Leopold Mozart to his daughter in Salzburg, 16 February 1785).

Salvatore Accardo, violin
Margaret Batjer, violin
Toby Hoffman, viola
Cynthia Phelps, viola
Rocco Filippini, cello

No biography found.

Booklet for W.A. Mozart: String quintets KV 406, KV 516