Death shadowed both of them that year. Felix Mendelssohn died in November 1847, six months after his sister Fanny — the shock of her sudden collapse, it was said, never leaving him. They are buried side by side at the Dreifaltigkeitsfriedhof in Berlin, and there is something almost unbearable about that proximity, the way it confirms what their music already tells us: that these two were, in some fundamental sense, a single creative intelligence divided between two bodies. Quatuor Ebène has built an entire program around that fact, and the result is one of the more genuinely illuminating chamber discs to appear in some years.
The Ebène players came to international attention with their ARD competition victory in 2004. When I first encountered them shortly after, they were almost disturbingly polished — luminous tone, immaculate ensemble, and a certain smoothness that occasionally substituted finish for feeling. That smoothness is still there, but it has been earned now rather than merely deployed. There’s grit underneath it.
Felix’s String Quartet in a minor, op. 13 is the key work here, and not only because it opens the disc. Mendelssohn wrote it at eighteen — the year Beethoven died — and the Beethoven obsession is everywhere, most obviously in the way the quartet frames its outer movements around a song he had composed, “Frage” (“Is it true?”), a question that hangs over the entire structure like weather. The late Beethoven quartets, particularly the String Quartet in a minor, op. 132, are the obvious model, but what’s striking is how much of the voice here is already Mendelssohn’s own: the harmonic restlessness, the way melody seems always to be straining upward against its own gravity.
Quatuor Ebène plays the opening Adagio — Allegro vivace as if they understand all of this historically and feel it physically at the same time. Pierre Colombet’s first violin sings with a kind of aching directness in the slow introduction, and when the Allegro breaks, the ensemble attacks with a ferocity that catches you off guard. This is not the sweetly melancholic Mendelssohn of lazy critical shorthand. The Adagio non lento second movement is inward, concentrated, almost claustrophobic — the four players seem to be listening to each other with unusual intensity, and the dynamic shading is extraordinarily fine. The Intermezzo floats. The finale drives hard.
Then the F minor quartet — op. 80, the last thing Felix completed — and the contrast is devastating.
He wrote it in the weeks after Fanny’s death, and it sounds like it. There is nothing consoling here, nothing of the famous Mendelssohnian grace. The opening movement is brutal in its forward momentum, almost Beethoven’s late style stripped of metaphysics and left as pure grief. The Ebène players do not soften it. Good. It shouldn’t be softened. Mathieu Herzog’s viola comes forward in the slow movement with a dark, slightly hooded tone that suits the music perfectly, and the finale — marked Allegro molto — arrives like something that has given up on resolution entirely.
Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel’s String Quartet in E-flat major, placed between the two Felix works, is not merely a curiosity or a gesture toward programmatic symmetry. Written in 1834, it is a more harmonically adventurous piece than its modest profile in the repertory might suggest — the development sections push into unexpected tonal regions, and the slow movement has a melodic generosity that might remind you, in its best moments, of early Brahms. The Ebène players give it the same seriousness they bring to Felix’s quartets, which is the only appropriate response. To play it as if it were charming but minor would be a condescension the music doesn’t deserve.
There are distinguished predecessors in this repertory. The Gewandhaus Quartet’s old disc of the op. 13 has a Romantic amplitude that remains compelling, and the Cherubini Quartet’s traversal of the late quartets has never quite been surpassed for sheer dramatic urgency. But Quatuor Ebène’s achievement here is to make a coherent argument — biographical, aesthetic, emotional — across all three works, and to sustain it for nearly eighty-five minutes without a moment of mere routine. That is harder than it sounds. Most chamber ensembles can play any one of these pieces well. Fewer can make you feel, by the final bars of the op. 80, that you have traveled somewhere specific and arrived somewhere you didn’t expect.
This disc is very good indeed. Don’t miss it.
