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Boccherini: String Quintets, Vol. 6

SB | 11/15/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

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This is actually volume 6 of Boccherini's String Quintets on Brilliant Classics (as the album cover agrees; these are not quartets, as the page heading may read). Anyway, the label states that this is "the only available recording of the complete Op.25 set, and part of an unprecedented complete cycle". So if the series is completed, there could be more than twenty volumes (given that Boccherini has one-hundred-thirty-something string quintets and six are recorded for each volume).



Now that may take a while...

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Profundity's Oscilloscope

Giordano Bruno | Wherever I am, I am. | 12/18/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Snipers who decry a lack of 'profundity' in the music of Luigi Boccherini just don't HEAR deeply enough. Yet that's a common theme in reviews of these magnificent string QUINTETS, of which Boccherini wrote more than 140. Even the author of the notes that come with this 2-CD recording - Emanuel Overbecke - nearly smothers the composer with 'faint praise'. "Aristocratic party music", he quotes an unacknowledged source: "... superior entertainment for the ruling classes." Ohime! Stronzo di critico! Couldn't the same thing be said about Bach's Brandenburgs, Haydn's piano trios, Beetheoven's Diabelli Variations? Or virtually all 18th C music except what was bought by religion? Boccherini spent most of his life, like Haydn, supported by a princely patron, but his real employer was Music itself.



I haven't read an extended biography of Boccherini, if there is one, nor his letters, if there are any, but I feel I know the man from his music. He was a quiet, thoughtful man, I think, who passed most of every day playing or writing music. His closest friends were the the father and three sons of the Font family, who premiered the majority of the quintets for their own pleasure, with the composer playing the more virtuosic second cello. Yes, Boccherini wrote his finest music for himself, for his own cello, the most profound of instruments. He probably took easy comfort from religion, rather than anguish, yet he wrote one of the most serenely spiritual Stabat Maters of all time. No Nun ever loved her imagined Bridegroom, no politician ever loved power, no cowpoke ever loved his horse more profoundly than Boccherini loved music, and music is its own profundity.



Sometimes I think Haydn and Boccherini had the right idea: live for music! Impudent Mozart and truculent Beethoven spoiled things for later musicians; what I wouldn't give to wear the livery of Bill Gates and have only to perform a sonata or two at dinnertime in his Microsoft hunting lodge!



Fortunately the two cellists - Luigi Puxeddu and Leonardo Sapere - and the three other string players of La Magnifica Comunità don't agree with their pompous note-writer Overbecke about Boccherini's music. They play it with the intensity and technical skill that it deserves. The six quintets of Opus 25 were published together in 1778. The four-movement orthodoxy of the classical quartet had not been established yet, and it wouldn't have mattered in the least to Boccherini, whose experiments in forms were irrepressible. The quintet in D major, for instance, is in five movements, two of them gravely pensive and only the finale allegretto. On the other hand, the A major and E-flat major Quintets are both in three movements, all gallantly vivacious. Boccherini was experimenting with sonorities in these quintets also, especially for his own beloved cello. He explored the full range of the instrument, from its lowest and darkest colors to the skylark qualities of the upper string in its uppermost finger positions, what some cellists called the 'perpetual snows'. Likewise he played tricks with his bow that no other cellist had incorporated in music. I doubt there's a cellist alive who would question Boccherini's 'profundity'.



This is volume six of La Magnifica C's "complete quintets" project, which may take far too long to reach completion for my little stock of patience. I've already reviewed volume seven. Don't waste time; buy now! I note that some volumes are already hard to find."