Word: laredos
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Along the trade routes in Texas, small border towns are preparing to shed their sleepy roots, and they are getting in position for the new NAFTA era. Laredo is already a service hub, hosting scores of freight forwarders, customs brokers and other outfits that move cargo from country to country. The tide of commerce that passes through Texas starts much farther north, and so far this year it includes more than 20,000 American-made cars and trucks -- up from fewer than 4,000 last year. From January to June, U.S. exports to Mexico rose 17%, to $24.5 billion...
...cannot overcome their natural soloistic inclinations. To me, this comes across more as a quadruple concerto than as chamber music. They clearly try to make an effort at ensemble, but Stern refuses to bend his pitches down and to liven his dry tone, Ax hardly ever thinks of balance, Laredo gets lost in the acoustic din when not playing his solos, all while Yo-Yo Ma tries to play down the middle...
...Schumann, the players plant huge accents and unlikely crescendos in their parts, as though trying to outdo each other. I agree that Ax's playing casts the largest shadow on these recordings. His clear and often too-powerful playing in the Schumann starkly highlights the roughshod scampering of Laredo and Stern. Laredo's most credible playing comes in the third movement, though his rich solo must contend with Stern's wavering obbligato...
...Schumann brings intensely emotional playing, but also bad memories such as the beginning of the fourth movement, where Laredo and Stern both lose the string of their solo 16th-notes by the end of their runs. I wouldn't want the quartet to take a slower tempo, but I got the impression that they were flying blind--they didn't know for sure whether they could really pull...
Stern and Laredo did seem to lose it in the final movements, but I had mostly given up by then. Another peculiarity that this recording shared with the Brahms release was the neartotal absence of the higher registers. As usual, Stern simply failed to get appreciable resonance from his instrument and was often downright tinny. Ax dominated the middle and lower registers, edging out Laredo and Ma in the process, and a lack of a suitable complement in the upper range gave this recording a disturbing hollow quality. Even Sony's 20-bit "Super Bit-Mapping" recording techniques didn...