Schubert’s last quartet teems with harmonic and melodic inventiveness and near-symphonic scope. The Prazàk Quartet players are exemplary Schubertians, their performance well-paced and incisive, giving full due to the drama and emotional power of the piece. If they don’t freight the ghostly opening with the depth of the Quartetto Italiano or the mystery of the Emerson Quartet, they easily stand beside those reference recordings with playing that clarifies the work’s structure and spans its seemingly limitless range.
They offer magical moments, as in the first movement’s gentle plucked background to the singing melody of the violin and then the cello. The melting beauty of the Andante’s opening is well-judged, though more objectively than the more lovingly caressed statements of the aforementioned ensembles, while the movement’s stabbing, mood-changing sforzandos are impressive, the musical equivalents of lightning bolts piercing the sky. The Prazàk’s wide dynamic range pays dividends there, while its fleet reading of the Scherzo, scurrying and nervously active, perfectly offsets the movement’s smiling central Ländler. The foursome scores again in the final Allegro movement, a large-scale, breathtaking movement alive with fecund ideas tumbling across the musical landscape.
The fillers are Schubert’s String Trios, both in B-flat major. The first, D. 471, is an attractive early Allegro movement from 1816; the second, D. 581, is a beguiling 18-minute, four-movement work that features a Lied-like Andante sung by the violin. The Trios are played to perfection by the Beethoven String Trio, two of whose members, violist Josef Kluson and cellist Michal Kanka, are Prazàk mainstays. Praga’s engineering captures both groups in fresh, vibrant sonics.
