Luogo e data di registrazione		Doopsgezinde Kerk, Amsterdam (Olanda) - 8-13 novembre 1976
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Engineer		Vittorio Negri | Willem van Leewen
	Edizione LP		Philips | 6503 060 | 1 LP
	Prima Edizione CD		Vedi link alla prima edizione in long playing.
	Note		La collana "Musica da Camera" della Philips riedita negli anni '80 alcune registrazioni del Quartetto Italiano.

When Luigi Boccherini, working from Madrid, entered the international music world with his string quartets and particularly his string quintets, the Rococo was flourishing in Spain. The paintings of the young Goya show a lucid harmony of colours. Human and social problems had not yet entered his canvases. Likewise, Boccherini's chamber music has none of the psychological depths which draw Mozart's quintets into the spiritual centre of his late chamber works. Boccherini's compositions represent entertainment music in the best sense of the word - entirely centred on virtuoso playing, dolcezza, and the most delicate colour and charm. "As a poem, as a dream and a perfume" was how Boccherini's music appeared in 1805 to the French easthete Chènedollé. Soon, however, in the Romantic nineteenth century, is fell into oblivion, until in the 1870's the famous Minuet was rediscovered, and inundated by a wave of popularity. In 1895, the Dresden cellist Friedrich Grützmacher brought out his very free arrangement of the Cello Concerto in B flat, and for a long time Boccherini was generally know - apart from the Minuet - solely as the composer of this work. Only much later did musicians and their audiences become aware of the rich treasure which lay in the many string quartets and quintets (with two cellos). The string quartets of Op. 6 (this according to Boccherini's own work catalogue - they are designated Op. 8 in the catalogue of Yves Gérard, published in London in 1969) were dedicated to the Spanish Infante Don Luis and printed in Paris in 1769. The following year they appeared in London and finally probably in 1780, an Amsterdam. Delicacy and sensitivity blend with elements of galant style in the quartets of Op. 6. Each has three movements, but the form and character of the movements and the sequence in which they occur are subject to no fixed norm. In the D major Quartet Op.6 No. 1, an Allegro vivace with a virtuoso first-violin part is followed by an affecting Adagio in D minor, and a graceful Rondeau Allegro in minuet character. In the E flat Quartet Op. 6 No. 3, there is an introductory Largo and the a Tempo di Minuetto and an Allegro. In Boccherini's Op. 6 dolce is the frequently encountered expression mark of a Rococo art. So too is the indication lezioso (daintly) over a passage in the first movement of the first quartet. Three decades lie between the pubblication of Op. 6 and the six quartets of Op. 58, which were issued in Paris in 1799. In all that intervening time, Boccherini's early established quartet style underwent only very slight modifications. In op. 58, however, he follows a new path. Ludwig Finscher writing on string quartets in "Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart," traces the orchestral richness of sound, the emotional tension, and the tendency to extreme effects (semitone progressions, violent dynamic contrasts) to the influence of the music of the French Revolution on quartet style in general. The E flat Quartet, Op. 58 no. 2, confirms this total view of Op. 58 in the orchestral tonal style of many passages and the close justaposition of stark forte unisons and light textured piano figures. The minuet is agitated by sforzati on unaccented beats, and the closing Allegro vivo assai shows some leanings towards contrapuntal working. Hans Christoph Worbs

Illustration: Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1826) "Blindekuh", um 1790 (Museo del Prado, Madrid)