Quartetto Italiano - Mozart: Complete String Quartets (8CD BoxSet) (2013) CD-Rip

This series of performances dates from between 1966 (when the six quartets Nos. 14-19 dedicated to Haydn were recorded) to 1973 and was rightly saluted on its completion as a fine achievement. The playing of the Quartetto Italiano has a freshness, range and subtlety that vividly realizes the music in all its variety, while technical problems seem to have been solved so that the music-making can be both spontaneous-sounding and thoughtful throughout.
As the son of a violinist and violin teacher, Mozart was himself a fine player of the violin and viola. Yet even so one is surprised by the assurance of his First Quartet, the G major, K80 (1770). I must confess that it was new to me and that I had expected a work showing clear immaturity: but I was wrong. This quartet opens with quite a songful and extended Adagio, twice the length of any of the following movements; these are an Allegro, Minuet and Rondo, and only in the last did I detect a hint of student-like manufactured passagework as opposed to a real flow of ideas. Oddly enough, this finale was a later addition, as the accompanying booklet reminds us: it is a little dismissive of the work, finding it dominated by the first violin, but this does not especially strike me.
The Quartetto Italiano give the listener much to enjoy (and Mozart much to marvel at) in the 13 quartets up to K173, written over four teenage years. One could differ with this or that detail—for example the opening Presto of K156 is a bit leisurely and its E minor Adagio perhaps invested with a profundity more suited to the later quartets, while the Andante un poco allegretto of K158 could flow more—but it is more sensible to enjoy these performances on their own terms, which remain consistently within good Mozart style.
The players have still greater interpretative challenges and opportunities in the quartets of the 'second period', by which I mean the ten quartets of 1782-90. These followed a gap of nine years (1773-82) which roughly parallels a similar hiatus in Haydn's quartet series between his Opp. 20 and 33; and as is widely known, Mozart's own six quartets from K387 to K465 were dedicated to the older composer and described by their creator as ''the fruit of long and arduous work''. Here, certainly, the individuality of the four instruments is fully realized, while the interplay of motif and melody between them is of a compositional order that makes the dull word 'counterpoint' seem inadequate and inappropriate. Sonata form still serves for the opening movements, but its most remarkable feature is its flexibility; similarly the fugal style of the finale of the G major Quartet that opens the series has sonata elements. Harmonically the language is daring too: one thinks of the stark modulations following the florid writing in the Andante cantabile of this quartet, of the tense chromaticism of K421 in D minor and, of course, of the famous Adagio introduction to the finale of the Dissonanace Quartet in which the tonic chord is not heard till bar 14, and then only for half a crotchet beat.
There is no doubt that the chief musical glories of this release, in music and playing alike, lie in this celebrated ''Haydn'' set together with the D major, K499 and the three ''Prussian'' Quartets K575, K589 and K590. But a longer discussion is impracticable here: suffice it to say that they are admirable (despite an occasional slowish tempo) and that the recording is fresh and faithful.'