Mozart Wind Chamber Music – Brindisi Quartet

Mozart Wind Chamber Music
Brindisi Quartet with Jaime Martin, flute; Jonathan Kelly, oboe; Nicholas Carpenter, clarinet
EMI Debut CDZ5697022 [63:34]

The Brindisi Quartet has been making the rounds—festival appearances, BBC broadcasts, the usual circuit for ambitious young ensembles. This disc, recorded at Abbey Road in early 1996, catches them in partnership with three equally promising wind players in Mozart’s chamber music for strings and winds. It’s a sensible program: the D major Flute Quartet, K. 285, the F major Oboe Quartet, K. 370, and the great A major Clarinet Quintet, K. 581.

What strikes you first is the sheer transparency of the recorded sound. EMI’s engineers have given us something genuinely exceptional here—you can hear everything, every strand of the polyphonic weave laid bare without clinical harshness. The flute and oboe quartets benefit enormously from this clarity. These are early works (well, relatively early—Mozart was already twenty-one when he dashed off K. 285 for the Dutch amateur De Jean), and they thrive on the kind of buoyant, unforced phrasing these players bring to them.

Jaime Martin plays with a silvery tone that never goes breathy or loses focus, even in the most nuanced passages. His articulation is crisp without being fussy. The slow movement of the Flute Quartet—that lovely Adagio—floats along with a kind of unaffected grace that’s harder to achieve than it sounds. Jonathan Kelly’s oboe has a darker, more reedy quality that suits the F major Quartet’s slightly more searching character. K. 370 is the most overtly operatic of these pieces, full of those sudden dynamic contrasts and conversational exchanges that Mozart loved, and Kelly and the Brindisis catch that theatrical quality without overdoing it.

But then we get to the Clarinet Quintet.

This is where things get complicated. Nicholas Carpenter plays beautifully—his artistry is beyond reproach, his intonation impeccable, his tone warm without being cloying. The Brindisis match him with playing of equal refinement. And yet… something’s missing. This isn’t the Mozart of 1789 anymore, writing charming diversions for aristocratic amateurs. This is September 1789, the year before the composer’s death, and the music knows things it won’t quite say aloud.

The first movement here is too cheerful, too untroubled. Yes, it’s marked Allegro, but that doesn’t mean it should sound merely pleasant. There’s an undercurrent of melancholy in this music—you can hear it in the way the clarinet’s opening theme keeps circling back on itself, in those chromatic inflections that shadow the A major brightness. These players give us the surface brilliance but not the shadows underneath.

The Larghetto is better. Here the deliberate pacing works in their favor, and Carpenter spins out Mozart’s long-breathed phrases with genuine feeling. But even here, I wanted more—more darkness in the D minor passages, more sense of the music’s emotional complexity. The third movement variation set is cleanly executed but a bit too neat, too well-behaved. And the finale, while suitably spirited, lacks the bittersweet quality that the greatest interpreters find in this music.

I keep thinking of the old Brymer album with the Allegri, or the more recent Leister with the Hagen—performances that understand this piece isn’t just elegant chamber music but something more profound, more troubling. These young players haven’t quite got there yet. They’re giving us Mozart the craftsman, not Mozart the visionary.

Still, this disc has real value. The two earlier quartets receive performances as fine as any in the catalog, and the Clarinet Quintet, while not reaching the heights, is never less than musical and accomplished. At super-budget price, it’s a genuine bargain. But if you want K. 581 that reveals the full depth of this extraordinary score, you’ll need to look elsewhere.