Review: Endellion String Quartet ****

To paraphrase a once popular advert, the Endellions give you music without anything added or anything taken away.

They are the epitome of willing servants, never intervening between the composer and the listener, the gentle humour of the

first of Haydn's opus 76 quartets captured with a sense of fun.

Mixing a refined and polished tone in the sublime Adagio with the rustic quality of the following Minuet and Trio, the dynamic shading and contrasts could hardly have been more exact.

By contrast they spared nothing in the dramatic turbulence of Beethoven's 'Serioso' quartet, the carefully weighted balance between instruments exposing many details that are often lost in performance.

The misleading thoughts of Mendelssohn as the cheerful person who composed everything in the geniality of his Midsummer Night's Dream music was appropriately swept aside in this trenchant account of the Second Quartet.

There is something of Beethoven in the intensity, anguish and restlessness of the outer movements, culminating in an unusual degree of sadness in the work's closing pages that anticipated the composer's later years.

Maybe some would have looked for a more soft-centred Adagio, but the unemotional treatment was much in accord with the viewpoint of a work far greater in musical substance than we usually encounter.