MOZART W.A. STRING QUARTETS Nos.21,22,23 - PRUSSIAN / Pražák Quartet

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) - "Prussian" String Quartets

1.-4. String Quartet No.21 in D major K 575 23:38

5.-8. String Quartet No.22 in B flat major K 589 22:48

9.-12. String Quartet No.23 in F major K 590 30:07

Pražák Quartet

Thanks to a first violin and a cello who are stylists of equal excellence, the PRAŽÁK QUARTET displays a plenitude and a way of playing that is both wholly refined and emphatic, in the lineage of the Galimir or Kolisch Quartets. These musicians play Mozart exactly as they would Schönberg and Webern, favouring the qualities of structure as much as colour and a highly modern sense of rhythm. There is an often incredible freedom to which one ought to send back the impudent partisans of a so-called ‘neo-Baroque’ Mozart, along with the imprudent detractors of Mozart’s last period, which managed to treat the cruellest melancholy ‘lightly’, but not without a primitive ruggedness.

(Praga Digitals)