Though there’s no shortage of recordings of the Beethoven quartets, versions by groups taking an historically informed approach to these works are still relatively rare. The Chiaroscuro Quartet play on gut strings using early 19th-century bows, and the tonal shift, towards a sound world that is warmer, more expressively flexible and transparent than we have become so used to in this familiar music, is striking from the very first moments of the E flat Quartet Op 74. The wonderfully paced opening grows steadily in insistence, until it blossoms into melody in a totally unforced way, setting the tone for everything that follows; there seem to be no preconceptions in these performances, everything comes from the music itself.
The challenges of the B flat Quartet Op 130 are on a different level, and not every decision the Chiaroscuro make in that work is convincing – the great slow movement, the Cavatina, is taken just a fraction too fast, for instance, but the finale that follows (the replacement that Beethoven composed in 1826, not the original Grosse Fuge) has a wonderfully clipped character that, like a lot in these performances, seems perfectly appropriate.
