They take to Mozart’s Hunt quartet with engaging alacrity. Tempi are sensible and the character of the music making deepens and ripens in the slow movement where a greater intensity indicates increased vibrato width. The sound and tone production remains one of considerable purity and congruity, a flexible spruce and very personal sound-world that often evokes bel canto lyricism.

These performances are issued for the first time on CD. © 2012 MusicWeb International Read complete review

The clean articulate liens of the Allegro vivace assai allow Borciani and violist Piero Farulli to converse elastically and with nuanced expression. The happy scamper of the movement proceeds with warm exaltation, especially fertile in harmony with Borciani’s extended trills or running passages. Even the traditional coda becomes enriched and develops along lines Brahms would find to his creative taste.

A dignified Menuetto and Trio ensues, a loftily expressive conception rife with courtly grace. The Trio dances on tiptoes, Borciani a step away from a miniature concerto or concertino. Borciani’s first violin dominates the long, melancholy line of the Adagio, the other voices shading its grief with hints from Gluck’s Orfeo. Franco Rossi’s deep-chested cello adds to the emotional alchemy an aura of primal loss mollified by spiritual serenity. The finale, Allegro assai, combines three themes in bravura fashion, the interweaving voices passing through each other in unbroken, supple counterpoints. The seamless ensemble moves so effortlessly, we quite jump in surprise as the London audience erupts in delight.

Quartetto Italiano added Beethoven’s 1825 Op. 132 to their repertory late in their career, c. 1962. Plastic and intensely molded, the lines of the opening Assai sostenuto capture the often groping melancholy and sudden rushes of improvised, exploratory lyricism that erupt from the composer’s pen…The abrupt moodiness of the piece, its fierce compression and harmonic audacities…

The “Holy Song of Thanks” receives a truly spacious, nervously taut reading, a clear precedent of anything like the yearning for spirituality in Mahler.

A Best of the Year candidate, certainly, as the British audience could perceive from the concert’s outset. © 2012 Audiophile Audition Read complete review