Weber is a difficult composer to categorise. Pay more than mere cursory attention to his small corpus of chamber music, for instance, and all sorts of delights emerge. That broadening of appreciation seems to be the impetus behind the sprightly yet intelligent, colourful yet reflective performances on this new Harmonia Mundi CD.

…Alexander Melnikov’s ‘Lagrassa’ fortepiano from 1815 Vienna sounds splendidly rich and trenchant. There’s pathos, precision and plenty of surprises as well as delicacy of melodic and harmonic idea.

The Piano Quartet is similarly opulent. By letting the lines of the music with its forward-moving and upward-facing architecture lead them, these superb musicians don’t have to work very hard to squeeze every last drop of expression from the Quartet.

There are also quiet and darker, sumptuously intimate and gentle moments. Its emotional essence is brought out so naturally and effortlessly by these players.

Isobel and Boris Faust, Melnikov and Schmidt play as a family. They are happy in the idiom, have that gift of seeming to be discovering the music as they play it on this recording yet are professional and technically expert to the core.

…there’s not a wayward note, an indulgent tempo or an excessively-expressed phrase from first to last. There’s consistency, shot through with delight and transparent with grace in the way in which each movement, each new musical idea of Weber’s is exposed.

The acoustic is just right: close but not overbearing. The aural experience is enhanced by the miking. The booklet has useful information on Weber, the players and the works. This is music that deserves to be better known. It has qualities of beauty, clarity—and a velvet crunch—that go a long way towards abstracting it from any epoch. © 2013 MusicWeb International Read complete review