Boccherini: String Quintets Vol.3

Luigi Boccherini (Composer), La Magnifica Comunita (Performer) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Performer: La Magnifica Comunita
• Composer: Luigi Boccherini
• Audio CD (January 16, 2007)
• Number of Discs: 2
• Label: Brilliant Classics
• ASIN: B000KHYO46
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #239,573 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

Disc: 1

1. Maestoso

2. Larghetto Con Espressione

3. Minuetto: Allegro

4. Presto

5. Allegro Maestoso

6. Larghetto

7. Presto

8. Prestissimo

9. Largo

10. Tempo Di Minuetto, Trio

See all 11 tracks on this disc

Disc: 2

1. Allegro

2. Andante Sostenuto

3. Fuga (Allegro Giusto)

4. Andantino

5. Allegro Giusto

6. Presto Assai

7. Andante Sostenuto

8. Allegro Con Spirito

9. Minuetto

10. Rondeau, Allegro

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars More of a "seasoned" rococo with some wonderful parts in it., May 14, 2008

By 

N. Cook "Allegro Squishyoso" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Boccherini: String Quintets Vol.3 (Audio CD)

This album opens with galiantry typical of the rococo era, though the medium of the cello quintet grounds the sound so that it doesn't fly off into pure lightness. There is a bit more seasoning in Boccherini's sound than in the previous album in the series as well as some more introspection.

The third quintet is a fascinating bit of work, though I think this particular recording of it suffers a bit on the outer movements compared with the gusto of the Quintetto Boccherini on the Ensayo label. Here they are played slowly and I think they sound much better at a faster tempo.

The fourth quintet takes the cake for me. From its very opening bars the cellos spin a mystery around you, the violins and viola joining in to bring the mystery up a promising hillside on which you think all will resolve and perhaps it does, until the recapitualtaion. Very exquisite like a dark chocolate because of the prominance of the cellos. The Andante takes you down a slow, peaceful river which ends with a wonderful fugue that brings back the rich darkness of the opening. This is just a plain great piece of music! La Magnifica Comunita does a superb job conveying it and I really have only praise for how they've pulled it off here. Ladies and gentlemen, THIS is a cello quintet if there ever was one!

The fifth quintet greets you with a very relaxing Andantino which leads to a wonderful Allegro with has a vibrant-but-not-over-the-top energy to it. The real party comes with the next movement.

Finally, the E Major quintet has a wonderful calm vibrance to its opening movement that is gorgeously sweet as it goes along. The middle Allegro is quite nice and sunny, followed by a slower movement, giving this the opposite structure of the usual "fast-slow-fast" structure for a chamber work.

Overall this is a good album with a few great parts to it, specifically the third and fourth quintets and the opening of the sixth. Four stars sounds right.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gorgeous Sonority, July 20, 2011

By 

Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Boccherini: String Quintets Vol.3 (Audio CD)

I have to disagree with the previous reviewer, Mr. Cook. This performance is far more robust and sonorous than the recording by the 'Quintet Boccherini', and the tuning is closer to "just". I'm posting the following basic review of the whole project, by La Magnifica Comunita, on all nine volumes that have been released to date (some of them re-released, so be careful of prices.)


Boccherini published his first six Quintets with two cellos in 1771, shortly after he'd committed himself to a career in Spain that extended for the rest of his life. The quintets were written and published, like all such chamber music of the period, for the enjoyment of musicians - players, not listeners, both performing professionals and amateurs. My apologies to all music lovers who listen but never play, but the greatest pleasures of chamber music are not for you. There's a level of sheer physical pleasure in such music that only the player can experience, and that was the level to which Boccherini was most devotedly attentive. So.. if you really want to love this music, get out your "air cello" and saw along! This is music to 'hear' with your proprioceptive body.

[That notion, by the way, is developed brilliantly in the scholarly book "Boccherini's Body" by cellist/musicologist Elizabeth Leguin.]

Boccherini has been persistently labeled a composer of the second rank, charming but not profound. In fact, he was an innovator of the first rank, in some ways a century and a half ahead of his contemporaries. This first set of Quintets established the structural possibilities of a form that was in effect Boccherini's own invention. Pay attention, for instance, to what the composer 'discovers' about the acoustic variety - the interior duos, trios, quartets - possible in a quintet. But Boccherini was also exploring the virtuosic capabilities of the string instruments themselves: the resonances and timbres, the sounds that could be extracted by different uses of the bow, the upper range of the cello, his own instrument. Boccherini was by far the first composer to treat the cello as the dominant voice in the quintet or quartet, and he was 'way ahead' of his Austrian "husband" in distributing the musical interest of his quintets to all five instruments in balance. Pay attention to the sound effects Boccherini achieves by deliberate doubling at octaves and by tricky double-stopping. Sound effects! This is music 'profoundly' attentive to sound as such, rather than to melodic architecture. Not until the 20th C was any composer so profoundly attentive to sheer Sound.

But there's more than just acoustic stimuli to this music. There's also Boccherini's discovery of Spain, of an Iberian musical heritage that Northern Europe was forgetting. Boccherini, the Italian wanderer, was to become the Founding Father of modern Spanish classicism, preserving and formalizing the 'fandango' spirit of the Spanish Golden Age. There's plenty of profundity in Boccherini's rediscovery of the New World.

La Magnifica Comunità deserves its name; they play magnificently on their 'period' instruments, and their 'period' instruments serve the musical vocabulary of Beccherini's quintets in ways that 'modern' strings can never match. The ensemble is attempting to record all 176 (one hundred seventy-six!) of Boccherini's quintets, over a period of years. So far they have released nine volumes, up to opus 39, so they are still short of half way. All nine recordings are "Magnifica"!