Quartetto Aglaia - Mozart: Requiem & Piano Concerto (Chamber version) (2006) CD-Rip

In the era prior to recordings, the only way for an audience unable to organize a symphonic performance to get to know a large work was to perform it, or hear it performed, in a chamber or keyboard arrangement. Recordings of arrangements from the nineteenth century have appeared in a steady stream, and while they're no substitute for the real thing, it's interesting to observe the artistry of the individual arrangers. Peter Lichtenthal (1780-1853), the arranger featured here, was an Austrian Hungarian living in Milan and trying, in the entertaining words of annotator Angela Romagnoli, to popularize German music "in a country submerged by operatic trills." The interest of this particular disc is that he took on two Mozart works that might seem resistant to string quartet transcription: the Requiem, K. 626, and the Piano Concerto in D minor, K. 466. The Requiem, a work that does not rely much on orchestral color, fares better; even its big, passionate Dies irae and Confutatis are essentially contrapuntal, and the opening Requiem aeternam makes a fine example of Mozart's mysterious, intellectual manner. The piano concerto posed a tough job for Lichtenthal, for this most Romantic of Mozart works depends on a bit of a struggle between soloist and orchestra. He did his best, filling out the string quartet textures in the tutti sections and pruning them back as the quartet supports the soloist. This results in an alternation between keyboard and strings that is a bit disconcerting, but one can hear Lichtenthal wrestling with the problem at many points, and the experiment as a whole is never dull. The performance of the work on fortepiano helps balance the forces, and the performance of the Aglàia Quartet is sympathetic to the aims of the enterprise; the violins pay attention to articulation and blend effectively in such a way as to suggest a larger ensemble. This disc is primarily for those with a special interest in performance practices, but it's listenable as a Mozart curiosity for anybody. The booklet notes, translated from Italian, contain numerous editorial mistakes and even a juncture where the translators apparently just gave up and inserted a question mark.