Chiaroscuro Quartet: Beethoven String Quartets, Op. 18 Nos 4-6

The greatness of Beethoven cast a long shadow. It was Brahms whose First Symphony was long delayed by the intensity with which the composer felt “the tramp of such a giant behind you”. And the shadow of Beethoven as a composer of string quartets has been even more widely felt. Beethoven doesn’t seem to have been immune to similar concerns in relation to those earlier masters of the string quartet, Mozart and Haydn.

He published piano trios, pianos sonatas, string trios, cello sonatas, violin sonatas and even a piano concerto before the issue of his first set of string quartets in 1800. They were composed between 1798 and 1800 and part of his preparatory work was the copying out of Mozart’s Quartets in G, K387, and in A, K464.

Expressive freedom

If you want to have the experience of these works as tilting into the future with imaginative and airily levitated expressive freedom, you need look no further than the Chiaroscuro Quartet led by Alina Ibragimova. This second instalment of early Beethoven quartets inhabits a world so cunningly rethought that it makes more conventional approaches seem like stagey actorly declamation when set against the give and take of the Chiaroscuro's more naturally inflected speech. Thoroughly cherishable.