Mozart: String Quintet No. 5 in D major, K593

The relatively novel instrumental combination which Mozart used for his string quintets (employing two violas) seems to have been inspired by a work by his friend and colleague Michael Haydn. Throughout his life Mozart loved the dusky sonority of the viola, always his instrument of choice when he played chamber music with friends. Beyond that, prompted by Michael Haydn’s charming, lightweight Notturno, he was evidently eager to explore a medium that enabled him to indulge his fondness for dark, saturated textures and rich inner-part writing.

The complete String Quintets is a enchanting body of chamber music, recorded here in a 3-disc set by the peerless Nash Ensemble.

As a music genre, the string quintet had its most authoritative representative in the eighteenth century in the Italian Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805), who composed no fewer than 113 quintets for two violins, viola and two cellos. But when Mozart first approached this genre, in 1773, he looked not to the model of Boccherini’s works, that had already been circulating for some time, but to those of a composer he knew very well and who, like him, had been in the service of the Archbishop-Prince of Salzburg, Michael Haydn (1737-1806), brother of the more famous Franz Joseph. Michael Haydn completed the first of his quintets for two violins, two violas and cello, in C major, on 17th February 1773. It was after hearing this work that Mozart set to work on his first Quintet, the Quintet in B flat major KV 174, in March of the same year.

Interpreters of this triple CD-set are the Quartetto Stradivari, a happy blend of the new and the traditional, with its four world-class string players bringing together a wealth of diverse talent passionately dedicated to the art of music-making ”en famille”. The quartet was formed in 1994, when the violinist Mariana Sirbu and the cellist Mihai Dancila, who had previously had a long and successful association with the Quartetto Academica, joined with Cristina, their daughter and the noted Italian viola player Massimo Paris.

When the complete Quintets by the Talich Quartet were released in the late 1990s, for the first time, these works - which in reality were performed in concert relatively infrequently and were not widely recorded - became accessible in all of their emotional power and stunning beauty.