• The prospect of listening to music written in times of personal grief, desolation and loneliness hardly filled me with joy when I picked up the Dudok Quartet’s latest recording entitled Solitude (Resonus), but I was wrong to be so wary. The playing from these fine Amsterdam instrumentalists had me gripped right from the start of Mendelssohn’s febrile Quartet in F minor, Op 80, his desperate farewell to his beloved sister and fellow composer Fanny, who died in 1847.
Much of Mendelssohn’s chamber music burns bright, driven by a brilliant, vital energy that here is turned into scurrying despair. The writing, beautifully crafted as ever, is nevertheless lost and dazed and shot through with an infinite sadness. Within a few months, Mendelssohn himself was dead, aged just 38. The Dudok Quartet get right to the heart of this piece, unsparing in the frantic opening allegro and sweetly tender in the adagio, before plunging into the abyss of the finale. It’s a very fine performance.
They pair the Mendelssohn with Weinberg’s uncompromising Quartet No 3, Op 14, from 1944. Weinberg lost most of his family in the Holocaust and was imprisoned by the Soviets. Every movement of this piece speaks of his bleak existence, none more so than in the andante sostenuto, a miniature concerto for the first violin, exquisitely played by Judith van Driel.
• Tragedy also struck the Czech composer Josef Suk, when his wife Otilie died prematurely in 1905, hardly a year after her father, Dvořák, his teacher. British pianist Jonathan Plowright has won praise for his recordings of composers as diverse as Paderewski, Melcer, Brahms and Handel and now, in an album entitled simply Suk (Hyperion), he turns his attention to four groups of sun-filled miniatures written before that dark year. The music is quite lavishly overheated and histrionic, but there is no denying Plowright’s formidable technique and total command of this repertoire.
• If you missed Radio 3’s broadcast of Scottish Opera’s Eugene Onegin, catch up on iPlayer. Natalya Romaniw, as Tchaikovsky’s heroine Tatyana, is simply sensational.
