V3: Early String Quartets

LEIPZIGER STREICHQUARTETT

The conclusion of a very special edition! The Leipzig String Quartet performs four new works and with them rounds off the series of the early string quartets composed by the sixteen-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart during his journeys to Milan and Vienna. Now that the general inspection of Mozart’s quartets by this ensemble is complete, the only question is: Why have these youthfully fresh pieces so very much been overshadowed by the ten famous “great quartets?” After all, it was with the carefreeness of youth that the teenage Mozart went to work here: escaping from the narrowly circumscribed Salzburgian world, he eagerly absorbed what was in demand: in Milan the three-movement Italian sinfonia was his model; in Vienna it was the four-movement sonata of early Viennese classicism. However, Mozart did more than just produce skillful stylistic copies; he varied the fashionable model with rich imagination. Historically informed and using bows from the period when Mozart composed the quartets, the Leipzig String Quartet sets out in quest of a sound in keeping with the times and incorporating ideas of musical rhetoric as well as long lines of development and singing cantilenas. The quartets of Mozart’s youth now produce a slenderized effect without economizing on tonal refinement. This is “classical” musical pleasure in the best sense of the term!