Concert review: Julia Fischer Quartet

Formed in 2010, the Julia Fischer Quartet – Fischer leading violinist Alexander Sitkovetsky, violist Nils Mönkemeyer and cellist Benjamin Nyffenegger – may not be the day job of any of its members, but this is precisely its boon. Here are four world-class musicians pooling together a stupendous combined breadth of chamber and solo playing experience, and doing it because they want to. So its April Wigmore Hall programme was a hot ticket with its contrasting trio of masterpieces: Schubert’s ‘Quartettsatz’ in C minor, Brahms’s Second Quartet in A minor, then Shostakovich’s Third in F major.

There was much to enjoy in the opening Schubert: a notably warm, dark, stably rooted but nevertheless fluid sound world; some beautiful tenderness; really gorgeous cello colour; and a dramatic coda. The Brahms similarly brought dark, rich rootedness. But was it too much like the Schubert, its stability edging towards carefulness? The finale’s opening first violin solo jarred with its tonal hardness. Still, there was much poetry within the inner parts to lap up.

Shostakovich’s Third is the Soviet-censor-friendly quartet that famously reduced the elderly composer to streams of silent tears when, years after performing its 1946 Moscow premiere, Beethoven Quartet members played it again to him privately. Here, it was given with ravishingly polished perfection, but it was a curious experience to hear this wounded music so low on subtext, albeit with heartache in its Passacaglia.

CHARLOTTE GARDNER