There is something almost vertiginous about sitting with this disc — two works in the same key, by a brother and sister who died within months of each other in 1847, their creative lives shaped by the same household, the same piano, the same father whose pronouncements about music and women had the force of law.
Abraham Mendelssohn was a banker who considered himself, famously, a mere hyphen between a famous father and a famous son. He was wrong about himself and catastrophically wrong about his daughter. Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s String Quartet in E-flat major, composed in 1834, is not a tentative work, not a parlor exercise dressed up in chamber clothes. It is genuinely combative music — rhythmically alive, harmonically restless in ways that catch you off guard, with a first movement whose developmental energy refuses to be domesticated by any notion of what a woman in Biedermeier Berlin was supposed to produce. The slow movement in particular has a singing intensity that sounds earned, not decorative.
The Minguet Quartet plays it big. Not inflated — big. There is weight in the lower voices, a genuine sense that the cello line is load-bearing, and the ensemble’s intonation in the chromatic passages holds firm where lesser groups begin to drift. What they sacrifice is a certain intimacy, the confiding quality you hear from the Chaos Quartet on Solo Musica, whose closer recorded perspective makes Fanny’s more inward moments feel genuinely private. But I find myself returning to the Minguet’s reading. It makes the argument — and it is an argument worth making — that this quartet belongs in the concert hall, not the salon.
Felix finished his String Quartet in E-flat major, op. 44, no. 3 four years later, and reportedly considered it vastly superior to his earlier efforts in the genre. He wasn’t wrong, exactly, though one suspects the judgment was also a kind of self-reassurance. The op. 44 set had been composed partly under the pressure of his duties at Leipzig, and he needed to believe he had broken through to something new. What he achieved was a quartet of unusual motivic tightness — ideas that return transformed, inner voices that carry thematic weight rather than simply filling harmonic space, a finale that generates its excitement not through sheer speed but through rhythmic displacement and cross-accenting that keeps the floor slightly unsteady beneath you.
The Minguet players are at their finest in the scherzo. The staccato articulation is crisp without turning percussive, and the trio section — where the texture suddenly opens and breathes — arrives with the relief of a window thrown open. In the first movement, they manage something genuinely difficult: projecting the music’s dramatic ambitions, which at moments approach the intensity of late Schubert, without making it sound like Schubert. Mendelssohn’s emotional world is brighter at the edges, less threatened by darkness, and that distinction matters.
The recorded sound from the Evangelische Kirche in Honrath is warm without being blurry. The ensemble is placed at a natural distance — not so close that every bow-change becomes an event, not so far that details dissolve in reverberation.
This is the fourth and final volume in the Minguet Quartet’s Mendelssohn cycle for cpo, and it ends the project well. The pairing of Fanny and Felix is not a novelty act. It is, finally, a fair hearing for both of them.
