Luogo e data di registrazione		Milano (Italia) - 4/6 luglio 1953 (KV 387) & 3/4 luglio 1953 (KV 421)
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Engineer		-
	Prima Edizione LP		Columbia | 33QCX 10024 - (Italy) | 1 LP | (p) 1953 | Mono Columbia | 33CX 1102 - (England) | 1 LP | (p) 1953 | Mono
	Prima Edizione CD		Warner Classics | 0190296739200 | 14 CDs [CD2] - 58' 35" | (p) & (c) 2021 | Mono
	Note		-

Unlike Beethoven, Mozart was a facile composer, but the six quartets (Op. X, 1783-1785) he dedicated to Haydn were "the fruit of long and arduous toil": thus he describes them in his dedication. "During your last stay in this capital, Vienna, "he continues, "you yourself my dear friend, expressed to me your approval of these compositions. Your good opinion... leads me to hope that you will not consider them wholly unworthy of your favour." (The dedication is in Italian: I have partly availed myself of Emily Anderson's translation.) Two powerful motives joined forces in Mozart's mind in order to create these conscientious and conscious masterpieces. One was the thought of the dedicatee, to whom they owed much (and who, in his turn, came to owe much to them). The other was Mozart's realization of the fact that the string quartet is a supreme challenge as well as a supreme responsability: superficially the least "effective" of all musical media, it can be, spiritually, the most telling. Sure enpugh, without the sage yet fullblooded serenity of K. 387 (the first of the "Haydn" set), and without the deep yet optimistic tragedy of K. 421 (the second), two central events in the story of the human mind would have remained untold. QUARTET IN G MAJOR, K. 387 The first movement's forthright first subject shows a duality of forte and piano which Mozart had developed into a highly characteristic means of structural expression, even though he probably "had it" from Johann Christian Bach. In the latter part of the theme, the dual approach expresses itself in a different way, i.e. texturally rather than dynamically: the phrases are distributed between the instruments. The little chromatic semiquaver figure in the second subject does not really consist of two notes that have the same rights and privileges; the upper note is merely "coloured" by the lower one in order to keep up the movement (thus remindings us of the origin of the term "chromatic": khroma means colour). The principle of thematic distribution between the instruments is maintained both in this theme and in the development, which the three upper instruments introduce with three consecutive, and as it were cumulative, variations on the first subject. In the minuet, the afore-mentioned dynamic dualism is compressed within the narrowest possible space: successive notes alternate between forte and piano, as indeed they had already done at the end of the opening movement's second subject. The displacement of accent thus achieved results, in effect, in a temporary 2/4 time, all the more so since the opening bars' first beats ean easily be heard as upbeats. The slow movement is in abridged sonata form, which is to say that a few modulating bars take the place of the development. (A "quick" example of this forms is the Figaro Overture.) In structure and texture alike, the finale is the most original movement: alternations between the "learned" and the "galant" styles between fugue and accompanied melody, are built into what thus becomes an unprecedented sonata arch, which iteself forms a precedent for the last movement of the "Jupiter" Symphony (1788); the two finales share, moreover, their art of developing an in iteself meaningless tag (the theme of the first subject) into an overshelmingly meaningful form of the sybtlest complexity. The recapitulation emits the opening a device foreshadowed as early as the famous D major Violin Concerto, K. 218, of 1775. QUARTET IN D MINOR, K. 421 The first subject's weighty bass sets the pace as well as the mood of the first movement. Significantly enough, the key of this mood, D minor, is that of Mozart's first Piano Concerto in the minor mode the celebrated K. 466 of 1785. The second subject, in the relative major, views the tragedy of the first in perspective. It consistes of a theme and one variation whose triplets offer the first fiddler a legitimate opportunity for a touch of brillance. Not that the triplets are limited in their formal function: they help to build the closing section of the exposition, whence they radiate into the development. The recapitulation's variations on the second subject succeed in uniting the (tonic) minor mood with a major emotional liberation. The "cello receives the lion's share of the coda and justifies the metaphor in the process. Although the slow F major movement is in ternary (A-B-A) form, the contrasting middle section is strctly thematic; its central portion is, in fact, an A flat major variation on the movement's theme. As opposed to its playful trio, the minuet is extremely serious: metre and lay-out apart, it has severed itself from the dance form. The threads of the chromatically descending bass are taken up by the fiddles in the middle section. The finale consists of four variations and a quicker coda on a siciliana-like tune which derives from Haydn's String Quartet, Op. 33, No. 5. Rhythmically, the most complex variation -  and one of the most complicated structures in the whole of Mozart - is in the second. It is what one would nowadays call "polyrhythmic", the viola being the only instrument which plays throughout the rhythm of the time signature (6/8). To all intents and purposes, the first violin plays in triple time, while the second, which has the really knotty part in that it has to be both flexible and decisive, pursues an unperturbed quadruple metre. The 'cello, finally, may be said to prefer a semple duple time. The third variation contains one of whose viola solos (in a dialogue with the two fiddles which play in octave unison) which remind one, by way of retrospective illusion, of Mozart's own viola playing: while he was not particularly enamoured of the violin, he loved to play the viola; and to complete our aural illusion with historical accuracy, Haydn and Dittersdorf would be playing the violin unison! The fourth variation is in the major, but the recapitulatory coda returns to the minor, until at the very end the major gains the upper hand not without a warning B flat in the final cadence. Note by Hans Keller (Columbia 33CX 1102)