Even if no applause had been included, you could guess that these two quartets were recorded live—in fact at the Lindsay's 1988 Festival of Brahms, Schumann and Mendelssohn at Blackheath. There is an immediacy and intensity in both performances, an ''inspirational heat-of-the-moment'' as Perahia once put it, so much harder to summon in the comparatively clinical atmosphere of a recording studio.
''One of the most impassioned outpourings of sadness existing in instrumental music'' was how Chorley described Mendelssohn's last quartet, written after the death of his beloved sister, Fanny. We're told that the initial impact of the news was stabbing enough for him to fall senseless to the floor. This performance not only conveys stabbing pain but also a very defiant note of protest in the three faster movements, all taken extremely fast and with very forceful accentuation. I thought the second movement slightly overdriven, at the cost of an element of pleading in the main theme. But the risks taken to capture the desperation of the flanking movements mostly pay off, even if some of the more frenzied moments of scoring take their tonal toll. For the bitter-sweet Adagio they find just the right note of emotion recollected in tranquillity. I only wish the leader's own personal involvement was not so frequently betrayed in audible intakes of breath.
For some listeners, I fear these same little intrusions may draw too much attention to themselves in Brahms's Second Quartet. Personally I consider it a small price to pay for a reading of such exceptional vibrancy and warmth. Like that splendid recent Decca recording from Hungary's Takacs Quartet, this one takes you to the music's innermost heart in a way making nonsense of the 'desiccated' image of this all too vulnerable romanticist. The recording is as clear as it is true.'