Feats of memory are badges of a musician's professionalism, yet seeing the Zehetmair Quartet play a whole programme from memory - a challenge hardly ever attempted by most string quartets - was a uniquely compelling experience. Even more astounding was the range of music in that programme. Haydn's C Major Quartet, Op 74 No 1, and Schumann's Second, F Major Quartet, surrounded a performance of Karl Amadeus Hartmann's Second String Quartet, a piece rarely heard in this country.
The benefits of the Zehetmairs' combined memory were immediately apparent. Each player knew the intricacies of the other three parts. In the Haydn quartet, Thomas Zehetmair - leader and founder of the ensemble, as well as a renowned soloist - engaged in a continuous dialogue of gestures with his colleagues. The result was a performance of extraordinary poetic range. The minuet was a masterpiece of artful rusticity, whilst the unadulterated round-dance of the finale exploded with thrilling, violent abandon.
The performance of Schumann's F Major Quartet was also searingly imaginative. But their account of the Hartmann quartet was still more astonishing. Written just after the second world war, Hartmann's work is an unrelenting lament. Throughout the three movements, Hartmann finds an expressive language between the rigour of serialism and the disengagement of neo-classicism. But at the same time as creating a fascinating stylistic synthesis, Hartmann's quartet makes a profoundly personal statement.
At the end of the slow movement, in the wake of a cataclysmic climax, the music's final gesture is a barely audible major chord. In the context of the Zehetmairs' performance, this moment was a vision of an untroubled past, a state of bliss impossible to attain in the post-1945 world. But when the frantic energy of the last movement also finished with a major chord, this time forceful, the effect was different. Here, the gesture seemed hollow .
For the Zehetmair Quartet to achieve the symbiotic musicality they displayed in the classical and romantic repertoires was remarkable in itself. But to manage the same intimate rapport in the complex music of Hartmann was miraculous.
