The Strad Recommends: Kuss Quartet: Mozart

The Strad Issue: August 2026

Description: Mozart quintets are reframed to great effect

Musicians: Kuss Quartet, Muriel Razavi (viola)

Works: Mozart: String Quintets: no.1 K174, no.4 K516. Schlomowitz: Bagatelle. Trojahn: Introduction and Interrupted Finale

Catalogue number: RUBICON CLASSICS RCD1203

This is the first in a three-disc survey of Mozart’s string quintets, each instalment also drawing in a young viola player at the start of their career. As a complement, the Kuss Quartet has also commissioned musical postcards to Mozart from living composers.

There’s no shred of complacency in the playing: the approach is as if everything is re-examined from the ground up. It just so happens that 95 per cent of what we hear aligns with what we might expect from the idiom. But the remaining 5 per cent is where the magic lies. It’s in the unanimity of accompaniments, the shining tonal blend (beautifully captured) and a wholehearted exploration of tonal colour – even, occasionally, leading close to extremes, as in the Trio of the G minor Quintet, where the fragility of first violin Jana Kuss’s sound risks breaking up altogether. There’s a heart-rending, operatic quality to the lyrical Adagio movements, the accompaniment for the one in the B flat major Quintet being especially effective, daringly unadorned as it is.

Manfred Trojahn’s four-minute Introduction and Interrupted Finale is an internalised song of isolation, played with an intensity and concentration that might befit a Webern miniature. Matthew Schlomowitz’s topsy-turvying one-minute Bagatelle adds a lively touch of humour to close.

EDWARD BHESANIA