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For the first time, the PRAŽÁKs have accepted the release of one of their innumerable official concerts—the 2,000th—, as recorded on 1 February 2000 with a simple ‘artificial head’, without the slightest (impossible) retake. On the programme: two Mozart scores, often on the lists of works that music lovers would take with them to live on their ‘desert island’, the quintessence of a musical culture emanating from… Vienna.

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The original juxtaposition of two final scores: Quartet D 94 (1814), which closes the series of 9 youthful quartets written for the family ensemble, and the Quintet D 956 (1828), Schubert’s farewell to chamber music—and to life

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The Quartet, Op.13, written by a gifted 18-year-old, let us discover an astonishing ‘music of happiness’ in which, according to Pierre Marie Baillot, one would again find the ‘joyous laughter of the elves of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, whilst denoting a precocious assimilation of the avant-gardist conquests of the recently-deceased Beethoven. The Quintet with two violas (1845), with its pre-Brahmsian breadth of phrase, alternates splendours close to the Violin Concerto, Op. 64 and autumn strolls and reveals the malaise of an overworked creator who did not have the time, before his premature death, to revise the finale, which he did not like.

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Two works completed before the composer turned 23. These ‘music scores of happiness’ in which, according to Baillot, one allegedly finds the ‘joyous laughter of the elves’ from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, denotes an amazingly precocious assimilation of the avant-gardist conquests of a Beethoven who had just died. Schumann even asserted: ‘He is the Mozart of the 19th century; he is the brightest composer of the age, and he comprehends, with finest humour, the contradictions of our time more clearly than anyone, so that he is the first to reconcile them’.

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The composer of Prince Igor was the only member of the famous Group of Five to leave significant chamber music, made up of youthful scores reminiscent of Mendelssohn, such as the String Quintet in F minor, and two brilliant quartets, the powerful charm of the Nocturne of the 2nd Quartet too often resulting in the neglect of the Quartet No.1 in A, despite its being denser and more elaborate, with its irresistible Scherzo, so admired by Ravel and Stravinsky.

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An amateur cellist, the composer of Prince Igor was the only one of the Group of Five to have written some ten chamber works for his personal pleasure in keeping with the laws of Germanic rhetoric - to Balakirev's great displeasure. One of them is a pure masterpiece: his Quartet in D, featuring an irresistible Nocturne, which has been played round the world in various arrangements.

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Written more than 15 years apart, these two scores, juxtaposed here for the first time, successively illustrate the somewhat morose ‘Nordic’ inspiration of the composer of Ein deutsches Requiem, then a more intimate poetic feeling, and finally a communicative serenity, the headiness of a ‘Hungarian’ dance in the Quartet, a sort of wild csárdás with quasi-orchestral force in the coda of the Quintet.

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