String Quartets K 157, 458, 589

After two widely acclaimed Haydn releases, the Jerusalem Quartet now logically turns to an exploration of Mozart and three distinct periods in his creative life. Haydn is not totally absent from this recording, since the central quartet belongs to the glorious group of six which Mozart, now firmly established in Vienna, dedicated to his elder in 1785. Twelve years earlier, the teenage composer was still amusing himself with the Sammartinian model in the third of his ‘Milanese’ Quartets’. And four years after the ‘Haydn’ set, Mozart abandoned the divertimento style once and for all, presenting in the second of the ‘Prussian’ Quartets a score that radically renewed the practice of chamber music.