Quatuors à cordes, op. 5

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Who is Franz Xaver Richter and what are three of his string quartets doing on a disc with two transcriptions from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier and a Canon for string quartet by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? Richter (1709-1789) was a bass singer trained as a composer by Fux's counterpoint textbook Gradus ad Parnassum, and three of his string quartets are on a disc with three works by Mozart because all of them are imbued by the spirit of counterpoint. Counterpoint, of course, was rare in the latter half of the eighteenth century when clarity and comprehensibility were all the rage. But Richter and Mozart, along with fellow composer Haydn, knew the value of contrapuntal writing, and all three made occasional use of the technique in their string quartets. On this disc, two of the three quartets by Richter include contrapuntal finales, while all three works by Mozart are contrapuntal from start to finish. As an exercise in musicology, this disc is fascinating.
As a performance of music, it is even better. Taking its name from one of Richter's contrapuntal finales, the Rincontro Quartet plays with maximum clarity and total comprehensibility without surrendering any beauty of tone, strength of rhythm, and brilliance of ensemble. In the fugues, one can always follow the lines without any sense of pedantry but rather of keen intellectual enjoyment. And in the expressive Andantes and the exuberant Allegros, one can simply sit back and enjoy the virtuoso playing. Captured in Alpha's clean, deep sound, this is a disc that any aficionado of eighteenth century string quartets will enjoy immensely.

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