Divertimenti Ensemble - Brahms, Weber: String Quintets (2007)

There are two principal reasons to try this disc. The first is to hear an attempted reconstruction of Brahms' Piano Quintet in F minor, Op. 34, as a string quintet. Accomplished by Sebastian Brown in 1946, Brahms' rescored and recasted quintet makes a fine work for strings, it's heroic piano part gone but its loss compensated for by the smoothness of the sonority. The second is to hear a work that's never been recorded before -- Joseph Miroslav Weber's String Quintet in D major from 1898. An entirely charming but wholly derivative four-movement work, Weber's quintet compares with the canonic late Romantic works in the genre by Brahms or Dvorák in terms of melody and harmony, albeit it's neither as tuneful nor as colorful. The performances by England's Divertimenti Ensemble on this 2007 Cello Classics recording are quite warm with plenty of vibrato, portemento, and rubato, and while this approach might not work as well in Mozart's quintets, it works beautifully here -- and one suspects that neither work would seem so immediately appealing without their juicy tone. The sound itself is close and immediate with perhaps too much "presence" for some listeners. For those looking for something out of the ordinary, but not too out of the ordinary, this disc will do nicely.