Opus13: Mendelssohn and Grieg album review – an assured and distinctive debut

The young quartet – winners of the Wigmore Hall String Quartet competition – continue to impress in a recording pairing Mendelssohn and Grieg

You would expect good things from Opus13 – current BBC New Generation Artists, and winners at last year’s Wigmore Hall and Bordeaux string quartet competitions – and this assured, distinctive debut lives up to that. The quartet formed in Oslo in 2014 as teenagers, naming themselves after the first piece they played together, and it’s with that work, Mendelssohn’s Op 13 No 2, that they lead off. The brief, soulful introduction breaks into a tense, runaway allegro in which the occasional violin swoop only increases the feeling of urgency. Mendelssohn’s debt to Beethoven in this work is clear, and the quartet play the slow movement with an intense warmth that makes it seem to belong beside that composer’s great adagios.

The Mendelssohn is nicely paired with Grieg’s Quartet No 1, a work full of insistent repetition beautifully handled here so as to create momentum rather than sap it. The folksy style hinted at in the second movement blossoms in the third, which gets a touch of Nordic fiddle, exuberant yet elegant. As encore there’s more Grieg, a characterful version of Solveig’s Song. The arrangement is credited not to a single person but to the entire group equally – which comes as no surprise at all.

Listen on Apple Music (above) or Spotify