Word: sterne
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...TIME's Bonn bureau chief, Bruce Van Voorst, says Russia might be the last to know: "The Germans have lost confidence that the Russian accounting system is at all accurate. The Russians don't know what they've got -- even (Boris) Yeltsin doesn't know much about this." Meanwhile, Stern, a German news magazine, reported that some underpaid workers at Russian facilities were eager to steal
Although Sony certainly has assembled a prestigious lineup sure to attract attention, the foursome 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...
...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...