Mendelssohn: String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, Op. 13

“The Emerson's sharp ear for textural detail ensures that we hear clearly every felicity of Mendelssohn's scoring, including those characteristic dark shafts of viola colour. ” BBC Music Magazine, May 2005 ****

“Cycles of Mendelssohn's string quartets are no longer a rarity and now the Emersons issue a full cycle that includes not only the early E flat work of 1823 and the Op 81 miscellaneous pieces but the Octet, which as a recording tour de force they play with themselves, as it were.
The Emersons have much to offer. One of their outstanding qualities is a sympathy for the tensions that so often lie within Mendelssohn's most apparently open music. They are also sensitive to the subtleties in his forms, above all in the first movements where there can lie a greater degree of emotional turbulence than is immediately evident. The Scherzo of the Fifth Quartet has a vehemence as well as a vigour, which the Emersons discover in the fierce figuration, and which is to some degree realised with the music's unexpected outcome in a fugue. If the Emersons' response to the finale seems overemphatic, this may be heard as the product of a movement that Mendelssohn marks emphatically, perhaps because the animation in the music does not seem to come from as deep as it does elsewhere in the quartets. There is, on the other hand, a delightful freshness of response to the whole of the Third Quartet (actually the last of the Op 44 set of three to have been written).
The final tarantella whirls along brilliantly.
In Quartet No 2, with its questioning motto 'Ist es wahr?' ('Is it true?'), the Emersons handle the opening movement lightly but again with that underlying touch of anxiety; they play the Adagio gravely and sense well the disturbance that informs the complexity of the finale. Their flexibility of response suits the opening movement of the First Quartet (they are more direct with the more straightforward opening movement of No 4), and they play the pretty Canzonetta quite lightly and briskly.
The last quartet, Op 80, Mendelssohn's masterpiece in the form, at once sums up his preoccupations in the previous quartets and sets them in a more profound context. The modulations within a sonata form movement, which with Mendelssohn are so often colourful or elegant, here take on a darker tinge which the Emersons understand, and they play the closing dozen bars of the Adagio with a touching sadness: the composer had recently learnt of the death of his beloved sister Fanny.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“A marvellous tribute to the Alban Berg Quartet's huge recording legacy featuring wonderful performances of the Viennese classics, together with a brilliantly executed Bartók No. 4 and a classic Berg Lyric Suite.” BBC Music Magazine, July 2008 *****