The playing on this disc is so ugly that it’s positively stupefying. It gives new meaning to Anna Russell’s famous reference to the strings as the orchestra’s “scrape section.” Just listen to the logy finale of the Serenata notturna, under-tempo and so scratchy in timbre as to turn each entry of the soloists into a masochistic aural experience in which individual notes are sometimes difficult to discern. Making matters worse, timpani have little impact and are poorly captured by the microphones, while the dynamic range between solo episodes and tutti outbursts is strikingly flat. It’s simply excruciating–but this is nothing compared to the slow movements of all three divertimentos, which sound like the musical equivalent of sandpaper–every held note squeezed with abrasive, tasteless, dynamic hairpins.
This especially irritating mannerism, the ubiquitousness of which can’t by any stretch of the imagination be linked to any normative concept of “style”, even extends to such theoretically light and breezy movements as the presto finales of K. 136 and 138. Frankly this sort of sound is not only utterly incompatible with Mozart (or with music generally), but Petra Müllejans and crew must be joking if they think that this represents what music in the 18th century should have sounded like. Naturally everyone is entitled to their own standard of beauty, but this hour of odious mewing strikes me as the musical equivalent of civilization without antibiotics, toilet paper, and deodorant. Must we be so conscious of the fact that strings were made from catgut? Aren’t you supposed to at least kill the cat before you start playing? Thank God for progress.
