‘I cannot help considering it a sign of talent that I do not give it up, though I can get nobody to take an interest in my efforts’. Fanny Mendelssohn

In her 1834 quartet, the young Fanny Mendelssohn announced her composing talent to posterity: here was her response to Beethoven and to her pole star, JS Bach. Its turbulence, originality and dark beauty distinguish it starkly from her brother’s quartets of the time, and yet, in her lifetime, it would never receive a public performance. The celebrated Chiaroscuro Quartet frames it with Haydn’s sublime Op. 33 No. 2 and Beethoven’s extraordinarily rich, six-movement Quartet Op. 130, ending with the amiable alternative finale.

‘There is in the Chiaroscuro’s interpretations an energy…that turns out to be galvanizing.’  Publico Portugal