Alinde Quartet: The Schubert String Quartets Project Vol.4

The Strad Issue: March 2026

Description: Highly polished readings just fail to touch the soul

Musicians: Alinde Quartet

Works: Migó: String Quartet no.1 ‘Sardana Quodlibet’. Schubert: String Quartets: no.3, no.14 ‘Death and the Maiden’

Catalogue number: HÄNSSLER CLASSIC HC25048

I’m late to the Alinde Quartet’s celebration of Schubert’s complete quartets, and find a group fully in tune with his idiom and in possession of the technical chops (and then some) to surmount the music’s fearsome technical challenges.

Perhaps that’s what’s missing from this otherwise admirable account: musicians and ensembles today are so well taught that even the most forbidding music is now assimilated more thoroughly than in earlier generations. Intonation, corporate virtuosity and minute observation of details are unassailable, but such is the Alinde’s command that the last degree of struggle, of coming to terms with a creative mind in ferment, is absent.

Players and listeners alike should be wrung out by the end of a ‘Death and the Maiden’ but in such a demonstration-quality performance, not a hair is out of place as we admire the cool precision with which it is dispatched.All well and good, though, in the 16-year-old composer’s Third Quartet D36, slightly foursquare in its invention but a worthwhile early showing in a post-Haydn style.

Marc Migó’s Sardana Quodlibet mashes up music from his native Catalonia with snippets of Bach, Beethoven and Bernstein, along with chunks of the slow movement from ‘Death and the Maiden’. It’s a decent gift to this quartet, whose performance is as fine as anything else here.

What can a contemporary composer add, though? Migó’s quartet unwittingly demonstrates how Schubert’s music, unadorned, remains as challenging, contemporary and essential as ever, even as we approach the bicentenary of his death.

DAVID THREASHER