The Brentano Quartet present the listener with one of those unresolvable but intriguing paradoxes of chamber music dynamics: unlike some quartets, their sound is not overtly dominated by their first violinist. Yet the excellent Mark Steinberg’s purity of tone and precise articulation, which do so much to make the Brentano’s sound so satisfyingly collegial, is at the same time also one of this quartet’s defining characteristics.
This self-effacing interplay ensured there was never anything run-of-the-mill about this varied programme of Mozart, Bartók and Brahms. They began with Mozart’s “Hunt” String Quartet in B flat, K458, bringing a sprightly freshness and vigorous fullness of sound to the bouncing 6/8 opening movement that gives the piece its nickname. However, it was in the more introspective and harmonically precarious music of the adagio that the Brentanos produced their most gratifying playing.
It was followed by Bartók’s Third Quartet, which was more harmoniously precarious still. It became the evening’s highlight, not least because this yearning and intertwining score offers so much opportunity for individual players to interact in quicksilver detail, while always working its way towards the explosive ending – in which the boldness of Nina Lee’s cello playing was particularly striking and wholly convincing.
Brahms’s Third Quartet, so poised and contented in all of its many moods, could not inhabit a more contrasting musical world from Bartók’s. The Brentanos met its very different challenges, although there was a brief patch of wobbly intonation in the first movement. The delicacy of Brahms’s singing slow movement, however, was beautifully captured, while the third movement allowed Misha Amory to offer a small masterclass in the characteristic eloquence of Brahms’s writing for the viola.
• At Christ Church, Chichester, on 8 January. Box office: 01243 781312. At Sir Jack Lyons concert hall, York (details), on 9 January.
