Quintettes à cordes Numéros 1 et 2

Description

The Allegro con moto that opens the First Quintet, a radiant work penned by an eighteen-year-old, looks towards the charming fantasies of Haydn's quartets, with a slender and slightly ironic writing that the Bartholdys savor with their playful bows, a work of pure pleasure that suddenly changes face in a storm. Romanticism bursts forth at times before the classical light reappears. The five friends convey this schizophrenia with as much poetry as eloquence. They add a Minuetto to the strikingly dark lyricism, which Mendelssohn had initially made the 3rd movement of opus 18, ultimately preferring a Scherzo with a more classical cut and tone. Everything changes with the Allegro vivace of the Second Quintet, which echoes the tension of Schubert's Quartettsatz. The work is splendid, torrential, almost orchestral in a way that his quartets will never be, with the additional viola giving the ensemble a darker hue. The popular harmonies of the Scherzando, the funeral march of the Adagio, again so Schubertian in color and momentum, the finale that bursts forth in a bright sun that the bows lift, rediscovering the giocoso that appeared throughout opus 18, this is a work that has found its interpreters. As a bonus, an alternative version of the finale, which adds little to this exemplary disc.