The Op. 81 Quintet is the more popular of these two A major quintets, but the Op. 5, written in 1872, has much to recommend it as well. Like its later sibling, there’s an immediately gripping melody sung by the cello and a piano part (in the first two movements) that’s full of Schubertian grace, idiomatically played here by Ivan Klánsky. The second-movement Andante sostenuto is the work’s center of gravity, and the Prazák sustains its mood beautifully. In the Allegro con brio finale, the piano emerges to take a prominent role, and the strings, often playing in unison, add their own fire. In Op. 81, the energetic first movement, the soulful Dumka, snappy Scherzo, and polka-based Finale add up to a significantly more mature, substantial work.
The Prazák’s Op. 5 is slightly marred by a rhythmically foursquare coda, but there’s little else to detract from these performances other than an occasional tendency toward the objective-generic. That soulful Dumka in Op. 81, for example, is played straight, with phrase endings sometimes abruptly clipped. And the cello solos here don’t have the individuality we hear from David Soyer in the still-compelling 1965 Peter Serkin/Alexander Schneider recording for Vanguard, much less the heart-on-sleeve emotional openness of Valentin Berlinsky in the Borodin Quartet’s 1982 New Year’s eve concert with Sviatoslav Richter.
And while the Prazák favors strong contrasts and gives a nice toe-tapping bounce to Op. 81’s polka-based Finale, there’s more excitement in the Janácek Quartet’s version recently released in a DG box collecting the ensemble’s 1950s and 1960s recordings for Decca, Westminster, and DG–and there’s nothing like the wildly joyous spirit that pervades that last movement in the version by Richter & Co. Praga’s engineering is good, with fine string-piano balance and no spotlighting, but there’s a touch of harshness in the violin at higher volume levels and some boxiness in the Op. 81’s climaxes–nothing blatant enough to get upset about, but it’s there.
For a truly memorable version of these two works try to find the Richter/Borodin disc, last sighted on Revelation, a label no longer distributed in the U.S. I’ve heard no pairing of these works that comes close to the spontaneity and sustained tension of the Richter, even in its over-the-top Dumka of Op. 81. Other alternatives for Op. 81 include the Pressler/Emerson Quartet on DG, the above-mentioned Serkin/Schneider Vanguard, and the Firkusny/Juilliard on Sony, but you can’t go wrong with this accomplished Prazák disc. [5/26/2003]
