There will be listeners who have come across the Paris string quartets in the so-called quatuor cancertant manner, that is to say with a soloistic firstviolin part that turns the work into something of a chamber concerto. This is something more unusual; a set of quintets in which a cello is the concertante instrument with a string quartet in attendance. Written in Paris in the middle of the first decade of the nineteenth century, the heyday of the quatuor concertant, they are typical of the ingenious Reicha in his use of the unexpected. He was a clever composer, as his pupils Berlioz and Liszt (among many other famous men) discovered to their benefit. These pieces find him in a more relaxed mode: no quirky fugues here. The minuets have been dropped, accentuating the chamber concerto manner; but the style is closer to the intimacies of chamber music without the intellectual subtleties of Haydn or Beethoven. They are really for cellists with a curiosity about the byways of their repertory; but others could enjoy this easy-going, undemanding music, nicely played by a group clearly out for enjoyment, and well recorded too.

-- Gramophone [10/1993]

If you happened to pick up this music on, say, the car radio, it would, I think, be quite a challenge to identify it. You could date it readily enough as belonging to the 1820s or 1830s, but I doubt whether you could put a nationality to it, still less a composer. Georges Onslow (1784-1853) was Anglo-French (English ancestry, French birth and principal domicile). Beethoven and Schubert are very distant as reference points, Mendelssohn and Spohr perhaps rather closer. The music, however, is richly worked, vivid and passionate. Its textures are very full and very busy, much more egalitarian than most in the chamber repertory – undoubtedly great fun to play – with much interchange between the voices, and involving elaborate accompaniment figures.

It would be easy to say that sometimes there is a lot going on and plenty of excitement, but not much actually happening; however that would be slightly unfair. The C minor work in particular, which has a programme derived from a shooting accident during a hunt when Onslow nearly lost his life, is quite remarkable: a first movement of great intensity, with some passionate music in the development section, a minuet (Dolore, febbre e delirio) with ferocious accents, vast chromatic slithers and diminished sevenths galore, portraying his desperation, then an Andante representing convalescence (not quite on the ethereal spiritual level of Beethoven’s Op. 132, but hymn-like and dark-textured), and then a brilliant C major finale.

The other two works are not programmatic but also have plenty of strongly imagined music. Op. 39 in E boasts a very appealing Adagio, its main theme presented in a variety of ways and contexts, a minuet with a fragmented melody of considerable charm, and an exuberant and powerfully developed finale. The first movement of the B minor work, Op. 40 again shows Onslow’s grasp of structural tension in the powerful shaping of sections and the absorption of lyrical and dramatic elements; there is another near-violent minuet (a development quite distinct from the Beethovenian scherzo style) and again a slow movement of much passion. In the past I have always thought of Onslow as a rather conventional figure, but that is mistaken. He may not be a great composer, but he is certainly an extremely interesting one, with ideas of some originality and a considerable technique. These musicians, using the famous Stradivari instruments in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC, play with great spirit, warmth and skill and convey the full measure of the passion behind the music. I hope many readers will try this fascinating disc.

Stanley Sadie, Gramophone [6/1996]

Even though German-born composer Felix Mendelssohn began his musical education on the piano, some of his most brilliant compositions were written for strings. Many believe his inclination toward strings was largely due to the fact that he studied Beethoven's quartets during his teenage years in Berlin. Though some of Mendelssohn's string quartets show evidence of this influence, his string quintets have been said to be a clearer representation of "Mendelssohnian" music at its best.
On this album, the L'Archibudelli quartet paints a telling portrait of Mendelssohn's spontaneous temperament, as every instrument reflects the individualistic style Mendelssohn was known for. During the sprightly Quintet for Strings no 1, the violins and violas mingle nonchalantly, playing their parts as if every other note or short phrase was added on a whim.
Despite the free-spirited nature of the music, the members of the L'Archibudelli quintet are remarkably sensitive to changes in the music's timbre, as every player adjusts immediately every time there is an unexpected crescendo or subito piano. Though the Quintet for Strings No. 2 starts off with a little more conviction than the first, it possesses the same quality of melodic and harmonic creativity. With such a keen adaption of the composer's style, listeners may be led to think they are listening to Mendelssohn's exact sentiments instead of just a well-played recording of his music.

The two duos are, of course, the real thing. These readings are the first on original instruments to have come my way; and very persuasive they are too. So often in recordings of these works the violinist, usually an international virtuoso, is much the more assertive player, hardly encouraging his partner to shake off the violist's natural reticence. Here, though, Vera Beths and Jurgen Kussmaul are beautifully matched, enabling one to savour fully Mozart's wonderful ingenuity in overcoming the medium's potential monotony of texture. Listen, for instance, to the duo's raillery in the variation finale of K424, or in the first movement development of K423, with its sequences of arpeggios tossed gleefully between the voices (from 3'41"). These are essentially gentle, intimate readings, with generally leisurely tempos that allow room for much delicately expressive detail; and I enjoyed the touches of rhythmic flexibility in movements like the opening of K423 and the Andante of K424. Occasionally, as in the finale of K424, flexibility can verge on waywardness; and to my ears the coda theme of K423's Adagio (from 2'41") sounds halting and selfconscious rather than expressively intense, as the players presumably intended. But these are rare misjudgements. Beths and Kussmaul form a true, selfless partnership and are recorded in an intimate, natural acoustic.

– Gramophone [4/1992]