Borodin: String Sextet; Glazunov: String Quintet; Arensky: String Quartet No 2 – review

Nash Ensemble(Onyx)Apart from their obvious 19th-century Russian connections, the common denominator between the three works here, all gorgeously played by the Nash Ensemble, is a strange one. The scoring of all of them includes two cellos — Glazunov's concept of the string quintet follows Boccherini and Schubert rather than Mozart and Brahms in preferring two cellos to two violas, while Arensky's Second String Quartet replaces the standard pair of violins with two of its lower-pitched sibling...

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