Awadagin Pratt’s Bach collaboration with the St. Lawrence String Quartet and friends is a hit-and-miss affair. The outer movements of the A major and F minor concertos are briskly delivered on a steel-edged platter, while the strings’ accompanimental figures in the sublime slow movements are too loud in relation to the melody-carrying piano. Whether intended or not, first violinist Geoff Nuttall’s strident, unvarying timbre dominates the mix. You have to go to Murray Perahia’s magnificent Sony versions to hear the music’s components in ideal alignment. By contrast, the Fifth Brandenburg offers superior balances and better-judged tempos. I like the musicians’ lilting interplay in the final Allegro, and the slow movement is sensitively spun. Yet Pratt’s lurching tempo fluctuations in the first-movement cadenza make little harmonic or structural sense, and he slam-dunks his final cadence to jarring and rather crude effect.
A few sourly tuned chords mark the quartet’s uphill schlep through Wachet auf. Pratt then drags Busoni’s Wachet auf arrangement into the ground and fails to project the middle-voice chorale tune in consistent proportion with the upper and lower lines as Paul Jacobs does with much less effort. Pratt’s introspective reading of the Art of Fugue’s first contrapunctus ends the disc, with the final measures winding down and trailing off into the sunset.
