Even by the standards of Beethoven’s late quartets, his String Quartet No 14 in C sharp minor Op 131 is a strange piece. Opening with a lengthy fugue, it sprawls across seven movements – although one lasts only 11 bars and several run straight into each other. Moods shift quixotically. Motifs are obsessively repeated and developed. Beethoven supposedly considered it his finest quartet, but two centuries later this remains a work that asks a lot of its listener as well as its performers.
No surprise, then, that the Berlin-based Leonkoro Quartet programmed this particular monument for their latest Wigmore Hall appearance since being shot to prominence with multiple wins in the 2022 Wigmore Hall International String Quartet competition. It’s an intensely serious statement of ambition from a group whose newest member was born in 2006 and who have recently garnered rave reviews for their second album.
There was much to be impressed by: the deep, cool incisions of the opening’s fugal subject, the absolute limpidity of texture in the densest passages, the unanimous, chattering pianissimos that seemed to emerge from a single 16-stringed instrument. Details were vivid – from no-frills trills to surgically precise bowing and occasional, anarchically gauche pizzicato – and the tone quality gleamed throughout.
Yet the drawback of polishing each bar or fragment to a high shine is that it dodges this work’s weirdness, straightening out its meandering rather than shaping it into a larger narrative. The last movement’s final chords consequently landed with a bump, lacking a sense of inevitable, hard-earned closure. The decision to play a Haydn minuet encore was also telling. Another virtuosic switch from musicians with energy to burn – but, for the listener, not unlike being served another starter at the end of a substantial meal.
The first half was ultra-Romantic. Webern’s early Langsamer Satz (all exquisite sotto voce yearning) was followed by a deliciously overwrought take on Felix Mendelssohn’s String Quartet No 2 in A minor Op 13: fast vibrato, huge collective breaths into voluptuous phrases, the players hurling themselves into the tumult as soloistic equals. This was an intoxicating, vital performance – and the Leonkoros are surely stars in the making.
