Admirers of the
Borodin vintage 1958 and 1964-69 can luxuriate in these fine
sounding and very mellow performances. Everything is beautifully
organised and in particular the tonal qualities of the quartet
are wonderfully rich and ripe. The Dubinsky-Alexandrov-Shebalin-Berlinsky
foursome had very fixed ideas as to this repertoire and that
clearly extended to the question of repeats. In the Mozart
Quartet for instance we find repeats well treated in the inner
but limited in the outer movements. This however can be persuasively
seen as an approach deriving from time and place and I doubt
that it will materially impede appreciation of the playing per
se.
That performance
of K421 stands at the mid-point in time of these three recordings
and was taped in 1964. For all the ardent romanticism of the
reading there will be many who would consider this – indeed
would have considered it back in the mid 1960s – as an imposition
of tonal breadth on genuine interpretative freedoms. True there
are most attractive things in the trio of the Minuet but the
grand seigniorial approach can sap the music making; rhythmic
devitalisation is often the result.
Their performance
of the Clarinet Quintet with a distinguished colleague, Ivan
Mozgovenko, shows similar tendencies - ones, I have to say,
with which the clarinettist sounds entirely comfortable. Mellifluous
and sonorous – you can hardly miss the very pronounced “bass
line” cello of Berlinsky – this is a reading that exalts rarefied
beauty but at the expense of inner dynamism. Earlier players
such as Kell and his various quartet colleagues often played
as slowly but invariably with greater incision and stronger
complements of accents and dynamic variation. The result, to
my ears at any rate, is that the Mozgovenko-Borodin team sounds
lateral and in truth, inert.
The Haydn is the
earliest of the recordings. The 1958 group had been together
since the early 50s and were already fully armed. But this is
a Haydn that sounds, even for the late 1950s, rather too smoothed
out and lacking appropriate grit. The intense warmth of the
collective vibrato tends to dampen the quixotic and to impede
momentum – in this of all quartets.
This is part of
a series of Melodiya reissues after a period in which companies
such as Aulos had access to the master tapes and issued them
using DSD remastering. You should note that K421 was coupled
with the Brahms Clarinet Quintet (Mozgovenko again) and issued
on Chandos H10151.
Jonathan Woolf
for
details
Ivan Mozgovenko (clarinet)
