Wednesday 4 March 2019 8pm

Mendelssohn    String Quartet in E minor, op 44 no. 2

Beethoven          String Quartet in F minor, op 95

Ravel                     String Quartet in F major

Needing no introduction to Ilkley and now in its 40th, and final, season, the Endellion String Quartet is renowned as one of the finest quartets in the world. Three of the original players continue to be members. As Gramophone stated in 2013: ‘There’s always a feeling when listening to the Endellion that you’re listening to the Urtext method of quartet playing … a uniformity of thought and instinct … allows them to play as a single entity’.

We start with Mendelssohn’s fourth quartet, demonstrating the 28-year-old breaking free from the shadow of Beethoven to achieve his own voice. Beethoven’s op 95 ‘Quartetto serioso’ – the last of his middle-period – follows, with harmonic language prefiguring the developments to follow in the late quartets. Ravel’s early string quartet, although it failed to gain approval from his teachers, won the praise of Debussy, catapulted Ravel to public fame and has remained in the repertoire ever since

“The Endellion is a quartet of the first rank: precision, clarity of articulation, and beauty of sound characterize both the individual playing and the stimulating interplay of the four team-mates.” THE STRAD