Chamber, Quintets, Piano Quintets, Brahms (composer)

The Pavel Haas Quartet and Boris Giltburg take on [the Piano Quintet] with no holds barred: this is an allgiving, full-on version in which the sense of involvement is total and the exhilaration... — BBC Music Magazine, July 2022, 4 out of 5 stars More…

This is technically flawless playing, and discipline and rigour also shape the interpretations. The plangent harmonies are kept firmly in order…The fine-boned vibrato is disciplined, occasional... — BBC Music Magazine, February 2020, 4 out of 5 stars (Performance) / 5 out of 5 stars (Recording) More…

With an almost ideal balance between piano and strings, the variety of articulation in their playing brings a marvellous textural variety to the full-blooded writing in the outer movements of... — BBC Music Magazine, November 2007, 5 out of 5 stars More…

When you have an intelligent, technically almost superhuman ensemble like the Emerson Quartet, playing with obvious feeling for the music, reservations about quartet-style fly out of the window. — BBC Music Magazine More…

Several of the ensembles could have benefited from more sustained period of rehearsal, yet they still communicate vibrancy and the sheer enjoyment possible when fine musicians get together to... — BBC Music Magazine, August 2013, 4 out of 5 stars More…

The C minor Quartet requires playing of the utmost passion if its complex textures are not to sound clogged, and this is what it receives here, though the delicacy and affection the players... — BBC Music Magazine, October 2009, 4 out of 5 stars More…

In 2003 the Belcea Quartet recorded a nerves-on-a-knife’s-edge account of Brahms’s C minor Quartet (Op 51 No 1) for EMI. Here, more than a decade on, their conception retains its essential ferocity,... — Gramophone Magazine, October 2016 More…