Mozart Wind Quartet and Quintets – Gaudier Ensemble

There is a particular pleasure, growing rarer, in hearing wind players who actually listen to one another — who breathe together, phrase together, disagree together when the music asks for a little friction. The Gaudier Ensemble does this as naturally as talking. You sense it within the first eight bars of the Oboe Quartet, that shapely opening statement handed over from strings to oboe with a courtliness that never curdles into preciousness.

Douglas Boyd’s oboe deserves the first word here, since Mozart gave him so much to say. The tone has body to it, a grain, not the hooty piping you get from lesser players trying to sound “pure.” There’s a diminuendo partway through the first movement — a hairpin turn from bright projection to something almost confidential — that Boyd negotiates without any audible seam. It’s a small moment. It tells you a great deal about his musicianship.

Mozart wrote the quartet in Munich in 1781 for Friedrich Ramm, an oboist he admired extravagantly — he called him, in one letter, simply outstanding. You can hear why in the slow movement, an aria without words that asks the soloist to sing long-breathed lines over pizzicato strings, a texture Mozart would recall, transfigured, in Countess Almaviva’s “Dove sono.” Boyd sustains the line beautifully, if with a shade less mystery than some rivals bring to it. The rondo finale has real wit; the ensemble takes the fake-out cadenza — that suspended moment before the tumbling final page — with perfect comic timing.

The Horn Quintet is trickier repertoire than its cheerful reputation suggests. Written for Ignaz Leutgeb, the horn-playing cheesemonger Mozart teased mercilessly in the manuscript margins, with rude words scrawled next to the hardest passages, it substitutes viola for one of the usual pair to darken the string texture beneath the horn’s bright color. Nobody else quite imitated that scoring choice. Jonathan Williams plays with warmth and unforced lyricism in the Andante, but in the outer movements I wanted more grounding underneath him, more sense of the beat as physical weight rather than passing gesture. The playfulness is there. The architecture sags slightly.

Then comes the reconstructed fragment, K. 580b. A genuine oddity, and a delight. Left unfinished, presumably abandoned, it’s been stitched into performability by Duncan Druce with tact and evident scholarship. The instrumentation is the real curiosity: clarinet in C paired with basset horn, rather than the usual clarinet-and-horn or clarinet-and-bassoon combinations. The C clarinet is a shinier, more silvery instrument than the familiar B-flat horn; the basset horn digs down into a darker, reedier register. Set against each other in dialogue, they create exactly the kind of registral antiphony Mozart loved exploiting elsewhere — think of the trio of the Symphony No. 39 in E-flat, or the wind writing in Die Zauberflöte. When the two instruments converge in parallel thirds, though, the color difference nearly vanishes, and you get a single composite timbre unlike anything else in the Mozart catalogue. The performance dwells on both effects without overplaying either.

The K. 452 quintet is the anchor of the disc. Mozart himself thought it the best thing he’d written up to that point, in a letter to his father dated April 1784, and he wasn’t a composer given to overpraising his own work. The scoring — piano against oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon — creates a chamber-orchestra sonority in miniature, and the piece has a symphonic largeness of gesture packed into just three movements. The outer movements unfold with an almost architectural poise; nothing is rushed, nothing overstated. The Larghetto is where the performance finds its emotional center: a long-breathed cantabile that darkens, briefly and touchingly, into the minor before the light returns. It’s understated tragedy, gone almost before you register it, and the Gaudier players handle the transition with real sensitivity.

Sonically, the disc is a mixed bag. The winds in the first three works are recorded with such immediacy that the sound can feel slightly hot, almost claustrophobic — a volume adjustment downward helps considerably. K. 452 sits farther back, more naturally balanced among the five players, but the piano suffers for it: the tone is thinnish, lacking the middle-register bloom you’d want from a modern grand in this repertoire. It’s not fatal. It is noticeable.

Where does this leave the disc among the competition? It doesn’t topple the classic accounts — the old Marlboro performances, or the more recent, more polished Berlin Philharmonic wind soloists in K. 452 — but it holds its own, with playing of real character and evident joy. Anyone assembling a Mozart wind-chamber shelf, particularly at midprice, will find much here worth living with. The K. 580b alone justifies the purchase; you won’t find that particular sonority explored with this much care very often.