The Strad Recommends: Diogenes Quartet, David Quiggle: Gernsheim

THE STRAD RECOMMENDS

The Strad Issue: July 2026

Description: A neglected figure is brought alive in this compelling series

Musicians: Diogenes Quartet, David Quiggle (viola)

Works: Gernsheim: String Quartets vol.3: no.4 op.66, String Quintet op.9

Catalogue number: CPO 557762-2

My first impulse after listening to this third volume of Friedrich Gernsheim’s chamber music for strings was a resolution to catch up with the previous two and keep an eye out for the forthcoming last one! Often seen as just the proverbial footnote in music history, Gernsheim was a wunderkind as a composer, pianist and violinist, appearing in public in all three capacities before his eleventh birthday. By his early twenties he had met everybody who was anybody in the music world. Besides musicians as different as Liszt and Rossini, it was mainly Brahms whom he looked up to as a model, due to his ‘substantial invention alongside an entirely organic development’.

You could argue that Gernsheim’s admiration for Brahms and Mendelssohn shows all too clearly in his music. The opening strains of the String Quintet do exhibit a conspicuous closeness to Brahms’s Sextet op.18, and several passages in both pieces whisk by with Mendelssohnian lightness. While certainly not an avant-gardist, Gernsheim did, however, expand traditional forms and expressive means (the engaging booklet notes reveal that he even had a brush with atonality). His music is beautifully laid out and gives every instrumentalist much to get their teeth into.

The Munich-based Diogenes Quartet has taken its time over this project, and it shows. The players are entirely steeped in the idiom, shaping Gernsheim’s long paragraphs with aplomb and conviction, aided by a close, lifelike recording.

CARLOS MARÍA SOLARE