The Strad Recommends: Zehetmair Quartet: Brahms

THE STRAD RECOMMENDS

The Strad Issue: January 2026

Description: A rare foray into the recording studio reaps ample rewards

Musicians: Zehetmair Quartet

Works: Brahms: String Quartets op.51 nos.1 and 2

Catalogue number: ECM NEW SERIES 4878229

The Zehetmair Quartet is hardly a fixture in the studio – since the ensemble’s award-winning Schumann in 2003 there have only been three more recordings on ECM. More than two decades on and for this, the group’s fifth album, Brahms is in the frame, forming a pendant to that near-classic Schumann coupling, and with similarly revelatory results.

Aficionados of the Schumann will know to expect searching, agitated performances but may yet be drawn in by the predominantly lightly bowed, slightly tremulous ensemble sound, majoring on chilling pianissimos that are so often undercut by sudden surging, stinging crescendos.

That agitation is to the fore in the C minor Quartet (no.1), with syncopations that dance on the edge of the nerves, dynamic extremes and inquisitive tweaks to tempo. It’s hardly comforting listening – the bariolage and portamentos in the Trio section of the third-movement Allegretto become almost obsessive and oppressive – but it’s addictive and those attuned to the Zehetmair’s approach will doubtless find themselves pressing repeat and coming back time and again.

The A minor, with its greater sense of sustained lyricism, is warmed a little more from within but reprises the Zehetmair’s moment-to-moment, note-to-note reactiveness, its surfaces kept molten by the underlying ferment. These are performances that come as close as any to reaching beyond the pervasive stereotype of austere, intellectual Brahms with his rhythmic, harmonic and motivic games and revealing the passionate, human heart beating beneath.

DAVID THREASHER