Plenty of guts marks this album out from the crowd
THE STRAD RECOMMENDS
The Strad Issue: February 2026
Description: Plenty of guts marks this album out from the crowd
Musicians: Consone Quartet
Works: Fanny Mendelssohn: String Quartet. Felix Mendelssohn: String Quartets: no.4 op.44 no.2, no.6 op.80
Catalogue number: LINN CKD766
Fanny Mendelssohn’s sole String Quartet isn’t quite the rarity it used to be, which can only be a good thing. I’m not sure, though, whether it has been recorded on gut-strung period instruments before. Kudos, then to the Consone Quartet for placing it at the heart of this second volume of her brother’s quartets for Linn.
It’s almost inevitably a work on a less expansive canvas than Felix’s two minor-key quartets but it demonstrates that Fanny was no less attuned to the possibilities of the genre, fully in command not only of her material but also of its deployment and development.
It could barely have found a finer advocate here: the Consone presents it with full-bodied advocacy, the corporate tone rich, the recording acutely focused but allowing plenty of space around lines so that the voice of each instrument is heard as an individual character in the argument.
The same goes for the pairing of Felix’s E minor and F minor Quartets. These players have a seemingly unerring instinct for tempo, pace and attitude in this music, responding and reacting to its myriad moods, switches of dynamic and twinges of dissonance, not least in the heartbroken F minor – supposedly Mendelssohn’s harrowing reaction to his sister’s early death, less than six months before his own.
The finale, especially, seems to live on its raw nerve-ends. Volume 3 will presumably complete the cycle: I for one can’t wait.
DAVID THREASHER
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