Sunday 21 December 2014

Schubert's String Quintet - Pavel Haas Quartet

There is a handful of timeless classical masterpieces (or perhaps, more accurately, a basketful). In the hand – or basket – is Schubert's C major string quintet, D 956, one of the very last works Schubert lived to write. With this work alone Schubert earns his place at the top table with Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. It's a work I have loved since the 1950s; it's evergreen and one can never, ever become tired of listening to it.

I have eight recordings of the work, including with such luminaries as Casals, Heifetz, and the Amadeus Quartet (the version with which I grew up in the 1950s on an old LP). All older versions and rivals are, however, completely swept aside for me by the Pavel Haas Quartet (four Czechs, with a German-Japanese second cellist). The quartet plays the music with a passion a long way from Alt Wien, Gemütlichkeit and all that Viennese stuff. This is great music in the raw, a little like Beethoven's Große Fuge, with no holds barred and no prisoners taken. Recorded in Prague only last year, it is already one of the Great Recordings of the Century, in my book.

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