This recording concludes a very special series - the Leipzig String Quartet performs four new works and with them rounds off the series of the early string quartets composed by the sixteen-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart during his journeys to Milan and Vienna.

The Leipzig Quartet have been internationally praised for their recordings on MDG and with the addition of the early quartets, their performance begs the question why these early ones are so often overlooked in preference to Mozart’s later compositions. Historically informed and using bows from the period when Mozart composed the quartets, the Leipzig String Quartet sets out in quest of a sound in keeping with the times and incorporating ideas of musical rhetoric as well as long lines of development and singing cantilenas. The quartets of Mozart’s youth now produce a slenderized effect without economizing on tonal refinement. This is “classical” musical pleasure in the best sense of the term!