In just a few months another “Mozart year” will be upon us, the 250th since his birth, and record labels will no doubt deluge the public with new recordings and reissues of youthful junk that no musically sensitive person would look at twice were the name of Mozart not attached to it. So it is with most of his early quartets: cute, occasionally charming, innocuous works written in that fail-safe Classical-period style that virtually guarantees pleasant results as long as you follow the rules. And god knows, Mozart knew how to the follow them. It’s when he started making them that things got interesting. So one strike against this set is that it contains music that only the most hard-core Mozartean would consider listening to in the first place. Well, that’s not entirely true. These pieces also make good background or quiet listening music. Or they should.
Unfortunately even that use is precluded by these performers, who adopt a quasi-historical approach, with minimal vibrato and clunky phrasing (don’t ask me what’s historical about that) that makes hearing them a real chore. There’s no need to punish you with a lengthy description of how the Cuarteto Casals punished me for more than three and a half hours, but the D minor quartet K. 173, the most important work in the bunch, tells it all. The first movement is unsteady in tempo, the phrases in quick notes rushed. Sustained lines in slow music turn to timbral vinegar just when a real, Mozartean cantabile is called for. The various entrances in the closing fugue are crudely underlined and phrased in a manner that makes this early and prophetic example of Mozartean chromaticism whine obnoxiously. So brace yourselves, folks. 2006 is just around the corner, and on this evidence it’s gonna get ugly.
