Here is a set of brilliant but not dazzling performances of Mendelssohn’s Op 44 Quartets: that is to say, they illuminate the music but never blind the listener with empty demonstration of the players’ virtuosity. Certainly the speeds are fast, but the fingerwork is so deft and the textures (helped by excellent recording) so lucid that everything Mendelssohn asks for is clear. Of the three works in this marvellous set, it is the third, in E flat (No 5), which stands highest, with one of the finest of all his first movements and an Adagio of a pensiveness that the players reflect in their just tempo and in the slight greying of their tone. The scherzo and the finale (Allegro con fuoco) are classic examples of how the rigorous contrapuntal teaching which Mendelssohn received in his youth from old Carl Zelter gave him the technique for music of not merely pace but of the wit and ingenuity that comes from real cleverness. It is music to enliven the spirit, and so is this performance of it.
The quartet’s sense of tempo serves them well in the D major Quartet, Mendelssohn’s own favourite, with a Menuetto whose harmonic originality encourages a certain wistfulness in the playing, and in the E minor Quartet with an Andante that keeps gently moving (Mendelssohn particularly marked it nicht schleppend, ‘not dragging’). One might regret that none of the first movement repeats are observed, but as there is already 80 minutes’ music here, such a complaint would be unreasonable. Included in the booklet is a long, excellent historical and descriptive note by Alain Patrick Olivier, which has been translated (as is notoriously not always the case) into good English prose. Altogether an outstanding issue