Brahms & Shostakovich: The Quintets for Piano and Strings (Johannes Brahms - Dmitry Shostakovich)

Chronique

Students, graduates, and now professors at the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatoire, the members of the St. Petersburg Chamber Soloists are ardent and accomplished musicians, and their performances here of Brahms' and Shostakovich's Piano Quartets are passionately massive and powerfully monumental. The Brahms F minor Quintet is enormous in scope and immense in strength. The Shostakovich G minor is gigantic in scale and gargantuan in sheer muscle. While the Brahms lacks the warm humanity of the Budapest Quartet's recording with Rudolf Serkin and the acute intelligence of the Quartetto Italiano with Maurizio Pollini, and the Shostakovich lacks the unrelenting intensity of the Borodin Quartet's recording with Sviatoslav Richter and the extraordinary understanding of the Beethoven Quartet's recording with the composer at the piano, the St. Petersburg Chamber Soloists' recording is well worth hearing by listeners who love the works and already have those recordings. Northern Flowers' recording is big and clear, but a bit distant.
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